I E RS ^o 
N KNOWN 
FRIENDS 



AN ABBOTT 




Gqyrighi N? 

COPYKIGHT DEPOSIT. 



LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 






LETTERS TO 
UNKNOWN FRIENDS 



BY 



DR. LYMAN ABBOTT 




GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1913 



#>Y| 



,K& 



Copyright, 1913, by 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

All rights reserved, including that of 

translation into foreign languages, 

including the Scandinavian 

COPYRIGHT, igl 2, BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY 



©CI 945 

Mi 



PREFACE 

For a number of years I have been carrying 
on a somewhat extensive pastoral correspondence 
and, in connection with my preaching, somewhat 
extensive pastoral conferences. For the last 
twelve years most of my preaching has been at 
colleges, and in connection with this college 
preaching I have held conferences with students, 
sometimes in groups, sometimes individually. 
In these conferences they have brought me their 
perplexities. The questions which they have 
presented have been sometimes theological, 
sometimes ethical, sometimes spiritual, but they 
have almost always been vital; that is, they have 
been questions touching the conduct of life, 
inspired by the desire to know how to live, not 
questions touching merely opinion, inspired by 
curiosity to know what I think. The letters 
which I have received from all over the country 



vi PREFACE 

have been of a similar type, and it has been 
a very enjoyable, and a not insignificant part of 
my life, to carry on this correspondence with 
Unknown Friends who have often, I think, 
written to me with the greater freedom because 
they were unknown to me, and thus they were not 
really disclosing any secrets of their experiences. 
These letters and conferences have been of in- 
valuable service to me in enabling me to under- 
stand and to deal with the vital experiences. 

They have been serviceable to me for another 
reason: They have often compelled me to 
question my own traditional beliefs and to find 
a reason which I could give to another for a hope 
which had not been founded on reason, but on an 
inherited habit of mind. That I have clearer and 
more definite conceptions of both theological and 
spirit al problems, yes, and of ethical problems 
also, is largely due to the service which these 
correspondents have rendered by compelling me 
to investigate the questions which they have 
addressed to me. 

It finally occurred to me that the questions 



PREFACE vii 

which these correspondents were asking were 
questions which a great many others were asking, 
though they knew not where to go for an answer, 
and that the letters which I was sending to 
these correspondents might, if somewhat elabo- 
rated, render service to other inquirers. So about 
a year ago I began in the Outiook a series of 
"Letters to Unknown Friends." Through the 
doorway thus opened many unknown friends 
entered, seeking counsel, and when it was pro- 
posed to me to put into book form some of these 
letters, in the hope that they might reach a still 
wider circle of readers, I gladly accepted the sug- 
gestion. Many but not all of the letters contained 
in this volume have been published in the Outlook. 
All of them have been written in reply to real 
inquiries addressed to me either by letter or in 
person. The many responses from read .S of 
these letters in the Outlook have been at once the 
best confirmation of my hope that they might be 
serviceable, and the best reward for the work 
involved. And this little book goes out with the 
sincere hope on my part that it may find its way 



VI 11 



PREFACE 



to other inquirers and render this service to other 
Unknown Friends. 

Lyman Abbott. 
Cornivall on Hudson, N. Y. 
January 1, 1913. 



CONTENTS 



VICTORY 



PREFACE 

MY CONFESSION OF FAITH 

A PERSONAL GOD 

NATURE AND THE GOSPEL 

ARE THERE THREE GODS? 

THE GAME OF LIFE 

CAN I LOVE GOD? 

RESTING IN GOD . 

TEMPTATION — STRUGGLE - 

PRAYER 

THE SECOND COMING . 

A SERENE SPIRIT IN A STRENUOUS AGE 

THE PRIVILEGE OF BEING A MINISTER 

LIFE PREACHING • 

RELIGIOUS CONVERSATION 

THE SABBATH PROBLEM 

CREATIVE EVOLUTION . 

WHY .... 

THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 

THE MINISTER AND THE CREED 

FUTURE PUNISHMENT . 

DOES HIS MERCY ENDURE FOREVER? 



V 

3 

16 

23 

29 

35 

41 

46 

51 

59 

63 

71 

82 

89 

97 

108 

120 

131 

138 

142 

151 

161 



LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 



MY CONFESSION OF FAITH 

A number of my Unknown Friends have 
asked me for my personal beliefs on certain 
fundamental questions, such as, Do I believe: 

In a personal God? 

In the divinity of Jesus Christ? 

In his resurrection? 

In the miracles? 

In the inspiration of the Bible? 

I have from time to time answered these 
questions more than once in the pages of the 
Outlook, and old readers of this journal may pass 
this article by without missing anything with 
which they are not already familiar. But I 
remember that the readers of the Outlook are 
constantly changing, that new readers are coming 
into our family circle who are interested to know 

3 



4 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

what I think about these questions, and I here 
attempt to give them a brief but measurably 
comprehensive answer. 

It might be sufficient to answer, categorically: 
Yes, I do believe in a personal God; in the divinity 
of Jesus Christ; in his resurrection; in the miracles; 
in the inspiration of the Bible. But such cate- 
gorical reply w T ould be understood in different 
ways by different readers, because these phrases 
mean different things to different readers. I 
therefore avoid the categorical reply, and set forth 
here my Christian faith, as far as possible, in 
non-theological terms. 

In January, 1890, I was installed as pastor of 
Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, and the Rev. 
Howard S. Bliss was at the same time ordained 
and installed as my associate in the pastorate. 
On this occasion there was gathered a large and 
representative council of Congregational churches, 
with members of other denominations present 
and cooperating, including representatives of 
the Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Baptist com- 
munions. At this council 1 made a statement 



MY CONFESSION OF FAITH 5 

of my faith, and in this answer to my Unknown 
Friends I follow closely the statement which I 
then made. There are two advantages in pur- 
suing this course. In the first place, my corre- 
spondents will be sure that I am not modifying my 
faith in order to meet their questions — though 
in some respects I modify the statement in order 
to make my answer at certain points more explicit. 
In the second place, they may be sure that my 
faith represents a large body of thinkers in the 
evangelical Protestant churches, since my state- 
ment at the council was approved, with only one 
dissenting voice. 

My faith in God rests on my faith in Christ 
as God manifest in the flesh — not as God and 
man, but as God in man. It is true that the 
argument for a Creator from the creation is by 
modern science modified only to be strengthened. 
The doctrine of a great First Cause gives place to 
the doctrine of an Eternal and Perpetual Cause; 
the carpenter conception of creation to the doc- 
trine of the divine immanence. The Roman 



6 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

notion of a human Jupiter, renamed Jehovah, 
made to dwell in some bright particular star, and 
holding telephonic communication with the 
spheres by means of invisible wires which some- 
times fail to work, dies, and the old Hebrew 
conception of a divinity which inhabiteth eternity, 
and yet dwells in the heart of the contrite and 
the humble, takes its place. 

But the argument that an intelligent purpose 
animates and controls nature to a beneficent end 
is strengthened, not weakened, by the doctrine 
of evolution; creation is more, not less, creation, 
because it is the thought, not the mere handiwork, 
of God.* It is not possible even to state the 
doctrine of an atheistic creation without using the 
language of theism in the statement. 

But the heart finds no refuge in an Infinite and 
an Eternal Energy from which all things proceed. 
That refuge is found only in the faith that God 
has entered a human life, taken the helm, ruled 
heart and hand and tongue, written in terms of 
human experience the biography of God in his- 

*Thc theological student may be referred to Wallace and to Bergson's 
1 Creative Evolution" for scientific demonstration of this truth. 



MY CONFESSION OF FAITH 7 

tory, revealed in the teaching of Christ the truth 
of God, in the life of Christ the character of 
God, in the passion of Christ the suffering of 
God. 

That God is in nature, filling it with himself, as 
the spirit fills the body with its presence, so that 
all nature forces are but expressions of the divine 
will, and all nature laws but habits of divine 
action — this is the doctrine of the Fatherhood. 
That God was in Christ, so that what Jesus Christ 
was seen to be, in the three short years of his 
public life, that God is in his eternal administra- 
tion of the universe — that is the doctrine of the 
divine Sonship. That God is in human experi- 
ence, guiding, illuminating, inspiring, making all 
willing souls sons of God and joint heirs with 
Jesus Christ — this is the doctrine of the Holy 
Spirit. And this threefold faith is the doctrine 
of the Trinity, stated in terms of my personal 
experience. 

Thus this Christ is the manifestation of God, 
not of certain attributes of God or certain phases 
of his administration. There is no justice to be 



8 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

feared in God that was not manifested in Christ; 
there is no mercy to attract in Christ that is 
not eternally in God. He who suffered, he who 
redeems, he will judge. I am not afraid to trust 
myself, my friends, or the heathen in the hands of 
him whose mercy endureth forever. My doctrine 
of a future judgment is all summed up in one faith: 
Christ shall judge the world. The spirit of the 
final Judge will be that of him who said to the 
woman taken in adultery: "Neither do I con- 
demn thee; go, and sin no more"; that of him who 
also with infinite indignation denounced the smug, 
religious pretenders of his time, who devoured 
widows' houses and for a pretense made long 
prayers, as hypocrites and as a generation of 
vipers, and yet with infinite pity appealed to 
them: "How can ye escape the damnation of 
hell?" The dogma that it is only in this 
life that man can repent, or mercy can he 
shown to him if he does repent, I repudiate 
as unscriptural and inconsistent alike with faith 
in the Fatherhood of God and in the freedom of 
man. The mediaeval pictures of eternal torment 



MY CONFESSION OF FAITH 9 

in hell fire are of pagan, not of Christian, birth. 
Except in the Book of Revelation and in one 
parable of Christ, fire in the Scriptures is a symbol 
of either purification or destruction, never of 
torment.* I refuse to believe that the accident 
of death transmutes God's mercy into wrath and 
makes repentance impossible, and so closes the 
door of hope upon the soul forever. Endless 
conscious sin I do not believe in. I could endure 
the thought of endless suffering, but not of sin 
growing ever deeper, darker, more awful. It has 
grown to me unthinkable; I believe it is un- 
scriptural. 

On my faith in Christ rests also my faith in the 
Bible. The Bible is the casket which contains 
the image of my Master — that is enough; 
whether it be lead or silver or gold is matter of 
minor concern. There are modern writers on law 
that may be as valuable as Moses; there are poems 

*In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus Christ uses the common opin- 
ion of his time to enforce the truth that God's condemnation falls, not on 
the pagan because he is a pagan, nor on the unorthodox because he is unortho- 
dox, but on the unloving and unbrotherly because he is unloving and un- 
brotherly. The lesson of a parable is to be deduced from the conclusion 
reached, not from the imagery employed. Christ's use of the unjust judge 
to enforce persistence in prayer does not mean approval or of indifference 
to the injustice of the judges of his time. 



10 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

of Browning and Tennyson and our crwn Whittier 
that are far more pervaded with the Christlike 
spirit than some in the Hebrew Psalmody. But 
there is no life like the life of Christ. The law 
and the prophets are sacred because they point to 
and prepare for him; the Gospels are sacred 
because they tell the story of his incomparable 
life; the epistles are sacred because they interpret 
that life as continuous in the experience of his 
Church. The Bible is unique and incomparable 
in literature, because it is the history of the 
revelation of God in human experience, beginning 
with the declaration that God made man in his 
own image, bringing out in law, history, drama, 
poetry, prophecy, that divine image more and 
more clearly, until it reaches its consummation 
in the portrait of Him who was the express image 
of God's Person and the brightness of his glory. 

So my faith in miracles rests also on my faith 
in Christ — he himself a greater miracle by far 
than any attributed to him. That beneficent 
power should have flashed from such a Christ, that 
death should be powerless to hold such a Christ 



MY CONFESSION OF FAITH 11 

in the grave, that angels should have announced 
his coming and proclaimed his resurrection — 
all this seems to me natural and easy to believe, 
as easy to believe in these scintillations of divinity 
from the Person of Christ as to believe in scintilla- 
tions of genius from a Shakespeare or a Dante. 

I do not believe that the laws of nature have 
ever been violated, for this would be to believe 
that God who dwells in nature and animates it has 
violated the laws of his own being. But it is easy 
for me to believe that unusual phenomena have 
sometimes afforded unusual evidence of his per- 
petual presence. Some stories in Scripture, such 
as the story of Jonah, I think are fiction, never 
intended by the writer to be taken as history; 
some, such as the story of the floating axe head 
and the coin found in a fish's mouth, I regard as 
folklore, incorporated by an undiscriminating 
editor in the historical record. Nor do I think it 
necessary to decide just what measure of accuracy 
characterizes each separate incident. For my 
faith in Christ rests, not on the miracles, but on 
Christ himself. Even as he wrought them he 



12 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

declared them to be but inferior evidences of his 
divinity. Their subordinate importance is clearer 
than ever now that they are no longer wonders 
which we witness, but the histories of wonders 
witnessed by others. To believe in Christ — that 
the Father is in him, and he is in the Father — 
this is Christian faith. The spirit which in the 
modern Church has sometimes sought to found 
Christian faith on signs and wonders appears to 
me to be almost as much one of unbelief as the 
spirit which outside the Church denies the mi- 
raculous altogether. Miracles are witnesses to 
divinity; revelation is the unveiling of divinity; 
but Christ is himself divinity; and he who accepts 
Christ — who loves him, reverences him, obeys 
him, follows him, lives to be like him — is Christ's 
disciple, however illogical may seem to me to be 
his philosophy about natural and revealed religion, 
about nature and the supernatural. 

But certain events narrated in the Bible and 
ordinarily regarded as miraculous seem to me 
thoroughly well attested. The geology of the 
region about the Dead Sea remains a perpetual 



MY CONFESSION OF FAITH 13 

monument to attest and interpret the story of 
the destruction of the Cities of the Plain; which 
was neither more nor less miraculous than the 
destruction in our own times of St. Pierre on the 
island of Martinique. The geography of the 
Red Sea tends to confirm the story of the Exodus, 
and enables us to understand exactly how an 
ebbing tide and a great wind might have combined 
to make the crossing of the sea practicable; the 
cloud which protected the fleeing Israelites from 
pursuing Egyptians was neither more nor less 
miraculous than the fog which protected Washing- 
ton's retreat from the pursuit of the British after 
the Battle of Long Island. In short, the differ- 
ence between the present time and Bible times is 
not that the age of miracles has passed. It is 
that we are more slow to see the presence of the 
Eternal in the events of life than were the Hebrew 
sacred writers. 

I think there is no better attested fact in 
ancient history than the resurrection of Jesus 
Christ. But, as I have often said, I regard it 
not as an extraordinary event, but as an extra- 



14 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

ordinary evidence of an ordinary event. Every 
death is a resurrection. Death is the dropping of 
the body from the spirit. Resurrection is the 
upspringing of the spirit from the body. That 
the disciples had some ocular evidence that their 
Master was still living, that his life was not ended 
nor even halted, and his promise to be with them 
in their future ministry was not an idle promise, 
appears to me to be demonstrated alike by their 
curiously conflicting and wholly independent 
testimonies, by the difficulty which they experi- 
enced in accepting the fact, by the change which 
it wrought in their characters, and by the extra- 
ordinary moral movement, otherwise wholly 
inexplicable, which was born of their conviction, 
and has transformed the life of the world. 

I have given here this confession of my faith 
because I have been so often asked for it. But 
one may accept this philosophy of life and not 
be a Christian, and he may be a Christian and 
not accept this philosophy of life. The oldest 
creed in Christendom is in Paul's Epistle to 
Titus: "The grace of God that bringeth salva- 



MY CONFESSION OF FAITH 15 

tion hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, 
denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should 
live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present 
world; looking for that blessed hope, and the 
glorious appearing of the great God and our 
Saviour Jesus Christ." To be a disciple of 
Christ is to learn from Christ how to live; 
to be a follower of Christ is to live as Christ 
lived. It is to make his teaching and his life the 
ideal for our own life. It is to live soberly, 
making material things always subordinate to 
spiritual life; righteously, loving our fellow-men 
as he loved; godly, walking in companionship 
with the Father, making it our will to do his will; 
and hopefully, looking forward toward and help- 
ing onward that kingdom of God which is right- 
eousness and peace and joy in holiness of spirit. 
My only reason for writing this confession of my 
faith here is the hope that it may help some of my 
Unknown Friends to live this life of temperance, 
love, faith, and hope. 



II 

A PERSONAL GOD 

Yes! I certainly do believe in a personal 
God; a God who has plans and purposes and 
affections, a God who cares for his children, 
a God to whom I can speak and who under- 
stands me, a God who speaks to me and whom 
I can somewhat understand, a God to whose 
inspiring fellowship I owe all that I am or 
hope to be; in a word, a God who is "Our 
Father. " 

And yet I do not wish to define this faith, even 
by so simple a word as personal. Because faith 
transcends definition, and the simplest definition 
is liable to be misunderstood. I once had a con- 
versation with a young man on this subject which 
ran something as follows: 

Inquirer. Do you believe in a personal God? 
16 



A PERSONAL GOD 17 

Myself. What do you mean by a personal 
God? 

Inquirer. I mean a great big man, sitting up 
in the centre of the universe, ruling things. 

Myself. No! I do not believe in that kind 
of a personal God. 

Inquirer. Oh! then you are a pantheist. 

We sometimes seem to me to be like a shipload 
of passengers who find themselves on a great 
steamer in the middle of the ocean, and who do 
not know where they came from, or what port 
they are bound to, or what is the object of the 
voyage, or who is the commander in charge. It 
seems very clear to me that life is not a mere 
game of chance, that nature is not chaos nor 
society anarchy, that there is a meaning to 'life 
and a purpose in it, that I am living in a world of 
law and not of fortuitous happenings, and that 
this world of law is under the ultimate control of 
a Lawgiver. And I find, on inquiry of my fellow- 
passengers, that practically all or nearly all the 
men and women for whose intellectual and moral 
character I have respect are of this opinion. 



18 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

I ask the students of nature, and Herbert 
Spencer, whose philosophy of life is all founded 
on an unemotional and unimaginative study of 
nature, replies: "There remains the one absolute 
certainty that man is ever in the presence of an 
Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things 
proceed." 

I ask the students of human life, and Hegel, 
speaking for Philosophy, replies: "God governs 
the world; the actual working of his government 
— the carrying out of his plan — is the History 
of the World." 

I ask the men who are probing for the secret 
of all life's phenomena, and Ernst Haeckel, speak- 
ing for Biology, replies: "The more developed 
man of the present day is capable of, and justified 
in, conceiving that infinitely nobler and sublimer 
idea of God which alone is compatible with the 
monistic conception of the universe, and which 
recognizes God's spirit and power in all phenom- 
ena without exception." 

I ask the moral reformers, the men who are 
trying to improve the condi lions of their fellow- 



A PERSONAL GOD 19 

passengers in this voyage of life, and Mazzini 
replies: "God exists. We ought not, do not 
want to prove it; to attempt that would seem 
blasphemy; to deny it, madness." And again: 
"Call it God, or what you like, there is life which 
we have not created, but which is given. " 

I ask the literary critics who study the lives of 
men in the record of their thoughts and feelings, 
and Matthew Arnold replies: "There is a Power 
not ourselves which makes for righteousness. " 

I ask the poets and Alfred Tennyson replies: 

"The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, and the 
plains — 
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns? 
Is not the Vision He? though He be not that which He 
seems." 

I agree with Spencer that the Eternal Energy 
is ever present in all our lives; with Hegel that 
He governs the world; with Haeckel that His 
spirit and power are in all phenomena; with 
Mazzini that His life is given to the world; with 
Matthew Arnold that it is a life which makes for 
righteousness; and with Alfred Tennyson that we 



20 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

may trust the Vision, though He be infinitely more 
and better than any Vision we have of him. 

These men the Church calls agnostics. They 
are agnostics, not because they disbelieve in God, 
but because they disbelieve in the ecclesiastical 
definitions of God. 

In the story of Israel it is said that when God 
met Moses at the burning bush, and gave him his 
commission to become the emancipator of Israel, 
Moses wanted a definition of the One who com- 
missioned him. "When I come unto the children 
of Israel,'' he said, "and say unto them, The God 
of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they 
shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I 
say unto them?" But God refused to give a 
definition. The Voice replied simply, "I am that 
I am. Say unto the children of Israel, I am hath 
sent me unto you." 

I have no objection to the definitions which 
theology lias afforded of God. But I accept none 
of them. Just because they are definitions they 
are too definite. No interpretation of God is 
true that is not aglow with imagination and 



A PERSONAL GOD 21 

warm with feeling. God is not a hypothesis to 
be explained, but an experience to be declared. 
I go, therefore, to the poets, not to the theologians, 
to speak for me. The Westminster definition of 
God as "a most pure spirit, invisible, without 
body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, 
eternal, incomprehensible," etc., etc., does not 
appeal to me. The hymn of Walter C. Smith 
does appeal to me. For it is a transcript of one 
phase, but only one phase, of my experience of 
the divine fellowship: 

"Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light, 
Nor wanting, nor wasting, Thou rulest in might; 
Thy justice like mountains high soaring above 
Thy clouds, which are fountains of goodness and love. 

To all life Thou givest — to both great and small; 
In all life Thou livest, the true life of all; 
We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree, 
And wither and perish: but naught changeth Thee. 

To-day and to-morrow with Thee still are now; 
Nor trouble, nor sorrow, nor care, Lord, hast Thou; 
Nor passion doth fever, nor age can decay: 
The same God forever that was yesterday.'' 

I believe not only that God exists, but that 
he is the inspirer of a life which we do not create, 



22 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

but which is given. I believe that our invisible 
Commander, the unknown I am, is ever sending 
to his children a message from himself, by the 
voices of the poets and prophets, by the vision 
of the artists and the musicians, by the heroic 
deeds of noble men and the pure lives of devout 
women, by the great achievements of the great 
leaders, by the humble lives of self-denying fathers 
and mothers, by the innocence of the little 
children, and most of all by the Voice that speaks 
to us and the Vision that is given to us in the hours 
of our silent communion with him. 

This is my answer to your question, "Do you 
believe in a personal God?" Does it seem to you 
vague? It is vague. All spiritual experience is 
vague. For all spiritual experience transcends 
defining. 



Ill 

NATURE AND THE GOSPEL 

I thank you for calling my attention to 
the article of John Burroughs in the Century 
Magazine on the "Gospel of Nature." In the 
main I heartily agree with it, and wish that I had 
learned in my youth to observe and to enjoy 
nature as John Burroughs does. 

Nature may be regarded as a vast machine 
which we are to study in order that we may use 
it for the enhancement of our comfort. So Mr. 
Edison regards it. 

Or as a laboratory, in which we may learn truths 
of life and acquire self-development. So Mr. 
Darwin regarded it. 

Or as a museum filled with curiosities and 
beauties, in which we may gain aesthetic enjoy- 
ment and that life to which beauty ministers. 

23 



U LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

So John Burroughs regards it. But nature has 
no gospel. 

Reverence is a feeling of respect and admiration 
which an inferior feels toward a superior. Nature 
is not superior to man; it is inferior to man. 
Nature is material, man is spiritual; nature is 
mechanical, man is intellectual; nature is blindly 
subject to invisible forces, man is self-governing; 
nature has no moral qualities and is not morally 
accountable, man is a free moral agent, capable 
of right and wrong, and subject to reward and 
penalty, to approval and to condemnation. We 
condemn Nero who rekindled the conflagration 
in Rome, but not Vesuvius which buried Her- 
culaneum in lava; we applaud the Dutch for 
bringing in the sea to drive out the Spaniards, 
but not the sea for coming in answer to their invi- 
tation. 

We may think of nature as a machine which the 
Great Machinist has wound up and set a-going. 
So Paley thought of it; but we reverence the 
Machinist, not the machine. 

Or we may think of nature as a body animated 






NATURE AND THE GOSPEL 25 

by the Great Spirit present in all its varied activi- 
ties. So Bergson thinks of it; but we reverence 
the Spirit, not the body which it inhabits. 

Whichever way we look at nature, we do not 
reverence her. 

John Stuart Mill has graphically described the 
unmoral character of nature: 

Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts 
them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, 
crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, 
starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons 
them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has 
hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the in- 
genious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed. 

Whether John Burroughs or Thompson Seton 
correctly interprets the animals, it is certainly 
true that nature is neither moral nor immoral; 
it is unmoral. There is no gospel in nature. 

Nature is not a manifestation of God. "The 
firmament showeth his handiwork"; but God is 
more than his handiwork. Man is the manifesta- 
tion of God. We do not look through nature to 
nature's God, but through humanity to human- 
ity's God. In man are the Father's lineaments. 



26 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

We can see them even in sinful, ruined man, 
as we can see the beauty of Greek art in the 
ruined temple and the broken statue. 

To man, thinking that nature is God, and 
worshipping an unmoral God, and trying to win 
his favours by gifts and sacrifices, comes the 
Gospel. And this is its message: 

Nature is not God; nature is not the image of 
God; man is the image of God. W r ould you 
know God? Look into your own heart; God 
dwells within you. Your sense of justice admin- 
istering law, your spirit of compassion administer- 
ing mercy, your loving self-sacrifice inspiring you 
fathers and mothers to give your fives for your 
children — these are the interpreters of God. 
God is spirit; you are spirit; you are God's off- 
spring; you and he are kin. 

And that you may know him better, he has 
come into your world and lived a human life 
with you; and he still comes into your world and 
lives with you. In humanity you are to look for 
his unveiling; something of him in every just and 
generous spirit; all of lii iii that you can compre- 



NATURE AND THE GOSPEL 27 

hend in the life and character of his Son, the man 
Christ Jesus. 

Jesus Christ was poor; reverence is not for riches. 
Jesus Christ had only a peasant's education; 
reverence is not for scholarship. Jesus Christ 
was without political authority; reverence is not 
for power. Jesus Christ taught as never man 
taught and loved as never man loved; reverence 
is for truth and love. This is the Gospel. It is 
not in nature; it is in human nature. 

Edison will not find a gospel in the machine, nor 
Darwin in the book, nor John Burroughs in the 
museum. But we may all find it in our fellow- 
men: in the justice of the statesman, in the min- 
istry of the doctor, in the patience of the teacher, 
in the compassion of the philanthropist, in the 
self-sacrifice of the father and mother; and most 
of all in the life and character of him "who for us 
men and for our salvation came down from 
heaven." 

You may not believe this Gospel; but it is at 
least well that you understand it. I do not 
wonder that men do not believe it. That the 



28 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

Eternal, the Lord and Giver of life, the Creator 
and Ruler of the universe, should have come into 
one human life, filling it full of himself, that he 
may come into all our lives filling us all with him- 
self, sometimes seems to me news too good to be 
true, too stupendous to be believed. But this is 
the Gospel. It is belief in this Gospel which 
makes me an optimist, and I find it easier to 
believe that man has discovered this God than 
to believe that man has invented him. 



IV 

ARE THERE THREE GODS? 

No; I do not believe that there are three 
Gods. There is only one God. And they who 
imagine, as some seem to do, that the doctrine 
that there are three persons in one God means, or 
is thought to mean, that there are three distinct 
divine individualities or personalities, totally 
misunderstand the doctrine of the Trinity. I 
do not propose to try to tell you in this letter 
what is the doctrine of the Trinity. I propose 
only to try to tell you how I think of the Father, 
the Son, and the Holy Ghost. 

A friend of mine who knows much more about 

church theology than I do tells me that I am 

not an Orthodox Trinitarian, but a Modalistic 

Monarchian. I am quite indifferent to the labels 

which are given to me, and I make no attempt to 

label myself. 

29 



30 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

There are three ways, and only three, in which 
any person can manifest himself to other persons : 
by his works, by the story of his life, and by 
his personal companionship. I ask a musical ac- 
quaintance of mine, "Do you know Elgar?" 
"Oh, yes," he says; "very well. I rank him as 
the first of living English composers." "Tell 
me about him," I say. "Is he a Protestant 
or a Roman Catholic?" "Oh, I know nothing 
about that," he answers; "I know him only 
as a musician." "Have you ever seen him?" 
"Never." He knows Sir Edward Elgar by his 
musical compositions. 

Stirred by my inquiry, he goes to a musical 
library, takes down from the shelves a cyclopaedia 
or a book of biography, and learns about the life 
of Sir Edward Elgar — that he is a Roman 
Catholic; that he began his career as an organist 
in a Roman Catholic church; that he later became 
conductor of an instrumental society; that his 
later work has been that of a composer. Now he 
has a new acquaintance with Elgar, an acquaint- 
ance which throws light also on Elgar 's music. 



ARE THERE THREE GODS? 31 

Later he goes abroad. He gets a letter of 
introduction, presents it, is received at Elgar's 
house as his guest. The two are congenial, and 
he becomes Elgar's intimate friend. Now he has 
obtained a third and still better acquaintance. 

But neither of these methods of acquaintance 
alone is sufficient. If the maid in Elgar's house 
knows nothing and cares nothing for music, she 
does not know Elgar. If the writer of Elgar's biog- 
raphy has never seen him, he does not know Elgar. 
If the performer of his works has neither read the 
story of his life nor made his acquaintance, he does 
not know Elgar. To a real acquaintance with 
Elgar a knowledge of his music, acquaintance 
with his life, and personal companionship are 
essential. 

I believe there is one God, the Father of all the 
living; that he is not an unknown and an unknow- 
able God; that he has taken these three methods 
to make us, his children, acquainted with him. 

We can see the evidence of his wisdom and his 
power in the works of nature. We can know with 
Herbert Spencer that we are ever in the presence 



32 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

of the Infinite and the Eternal Energy from which 
all things proceed. We can trace his influence . in 
the progress of history. We can see that history 
is an evolution from an unknown starting point 
to an unknown consummation, and that in this 
progress there is a steady development toward the 
higher intellectual and moral life of humanity; 
that, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, "there is a 
power not ourselves that makes for righteousness." 
The Father makes himself known to us through 
his works. 

He also makes himself known to us through the 
Incarnation; that is, through his dwelling in a 
human life. When I say that I believe in the 
divinity of Jesus Christ, I mean what John meant 
when he said, "The Word became flesh"; that is, 
God, who was always a speaking God, manifesting 
himself to men through his works, entered into 
the man Christ Jesus, and in him manifests what 
Henry van Dyke has well called "the human life 
of God. " I mean what Paul meant when he said, 
"God was manifest in the flesh"; that is, Jesus 
Christ was the supremest manifestation of God 



ARE THERE THREE GODS? 33 

possible in a single human life. I mean that he 
showed forth in that life the Spirit Eternal, so that 
we may know that what Jesus Christ was in his 
human relationships in that brief life the Father 
is in his relationship to all his children in all 
time. 

He also makes himself known most intimately 
by the companionship of his Spirit with our spirits. 

Jesus Christ declares of himself, "I am the 
door." We do not simply look at the door; we 
push it open and go in. Jesus Christ is the one 
through whom we come into fellowship with the 
Father, into a companionship with God analogous 
to that which Jesus had with God. He becomes 
to us the Great Companion. He is our Friend, to 
whom we can go with our joys and sorrows, our 
temptations and our sins, our struggles, our vic- 
tories, and our defeats, sure of his friendship 
and his aid, whatever our past experience or our 
present need may be. 

I do not say that this is all that the Trinity 
means. I do not think it is an adequate definition 
of the Trinity as it is interpreted by the theological 



34 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

books, but it is what the Trinity means to me. 
It is a Trinity in experience. It is acquaintance 
with God through his works, through his human 
life, and through his personal companionship. 
It is the faith that he is in the budding trees and 
the blossoming flowers this June morning as truly 
as he was in that day when he said, " Let the earth 
put forth grass, herbs yielding seed, and fruit trees 
bearing fruit after their kind;" the faith that he is 
in American history, guiding it to its predeter- 
mined end, as truly as he ever was in the history 
of Israel; the faith that he was and is in Christ 
reconciling the world unto himself by making 
himself known to the world and imparting his life 
to the world; the faith that he dwells with and in 
his children, "never so far as even to be near"; 
the faith that we may offer Paul's prayer with the 
assured hope of an answer, "That ye may be filled 
with all the fulness of God"; the faith that 
Christ's prayer for his followers will be fulfilled 
and is being fulfilled: "That they may all be 
one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee; 
that they also may be in us." 



THE GAME OF LIFE 

The other day one of our neighbours' 
children came in to spend the afternoon. He 
was beginning to learn the game of chess and 
asked me if I played. Yes; would he like 
to have a game? Very much. How did he 
want me to play? Should I play as well as I 
could and beat him, if possible, or should I 
play an easy game, and let him beat me? He 
reflected a moment and then replied: "Please 
play as well as ever you can. I want to learn the 
game." 

After he had gone I recalled a notable passage 
in one of Mr. Huxley's essays which, in the light 
of my afternoon's experience, seemed to me to 
throw a little light upon your question. The 
passage reads as follows: 

35 



3G LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the 
fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or 
less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our 
knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more 
difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has 
been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us 
being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The 
chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the 
universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of 
nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We 
know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also 
we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or 
makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who 
plays well the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of over- 
flowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in 
strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated — without 
haste, but without remorse 

Perhaps my youthful friend's reply to my 
question may throw some light on yours: Why, 
if God is good, is life so hard? Why, to use 
Mr. Huxley's figure, does the unknown Player 
never overlook a mistake or make the smallest 
allowance for ignorance? 

Why? Perhaps because he wants us to learn 
the game. Perhaps his object in our lives is to 
teach us how to live. 

I have no solution of the problem of evil; the 



THE GAME OF LIFE 37 

why and wherefore of it. A much more im- 
portant question seems to me to be this: 
How shall I meet the evil that comes into my 
world and get good out of it for myself and for 
others? 

Doctor Cadman, of Brooklyn, has said, "I do not 
wish to live in a fool-proof universe. " I agree with 
Doctor Cadman. I would much rather live in a 
universe in which out of my blunders I can learn 
wisdom, and out of my sins I can acquire virtue. 
I do not see how I can do this if there is no hard- 
ness in my life. Therefore I welcome the hard- 
ness. My prayer to my Father is: Be just and 
patient with me, but do not overlook my mistakes 
or my sins or even my ignorances. I want to 
learn the game. Help me to learn it by putting 
on me the consequences of my own misdoing. 
This is the prayer of the Psalmist: "See if there 
be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way 
everlasting." The way everlasting is not all 
flowers. 

Peter thus describes the process of character- 
building: 



38 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

Add to your faith virtue, that is valour. 

And to valour knowledge. 

And to knowledge self-control. 

And to self-control patience. 

And to patience godliness. 

And to godliness brotherly kindness. 

And to brotherly kindness love. 

How to do this is the problem of life. We can 
not add valour without dangers to be confronted; 
nor knowledge without problems to be solved; nor 
self-control without passions to be controlled; nor 
patience without burdens to be borne; nor godli- 
ness without a struggle to see him who is invisible; 
nor brotherly kindness without self-denying ser- 
vice; nor the deepest, truest love without loving 
where there is no payment for our love, even in 
gratitude. 

If we are eager to acquire these qualities, we 
shall be willing to pay the price in discipline. 
We shall welcome danger if it will develop valour; 
problems if they will develop knowledge; passions 
if they will develop self-control; burdens if they 
will develop patience; the struggles of faith if they 
will develop godliness; self-denying service if it 



THE GAME OF LIFE 39 

will develop brotherly kindness; and even ingrati- 
tude and enmity if they will make our love, like 
the love of the Father, spontaneous and irre- 
pressible. 

I repeat, I am not attempting to explain life. 
Much of it is enigmatical to me. The dangers 
sometimes seem too great for the endangered to 
meet; the problems too great for the reason to 
wrestle with; the burdens too great for the 
shoulders on which they are laid. As to my com- 
panions in life's voyage, I have the faith that I see 
only a fragment of their lives and of my own, and, 
as I know not what opportunities of development 
life may have for them in the future, I take refuge 
from my perplexity in a frank acknowledgment 
to myself of my ignorance. I have not to solve 
the problem and am content to leave it unsolved. 
But for myself, I can resolve so to meet the dan- 
gers which confront me as to increase my courage; 
so to wrestle with my problems as to increase my 
intellectual powers; so to bear the burdens which 
are laid upon me as to develop my patience; so to 
give my service to my fellow-men as to grow in 



40 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

brotherly kindness; so to meet wrongdoing with 
compassion as to make my love free and sponta- 
neous; in short, so to live that by my life I may do 
something to give help to the neighbour at my 
side and to borrow help from him, that we may 
both live bravely, wisely, patiently, lovingly. 

You and I do not need to understand the whole 
mystery of life in order so to play our game with 
the hidden Player on the other side that we may 
learn to play our part well here and prepare our- 
selves to play our part well hereafter, whatever 
it may be. So I can join with Adelaide Procter: 

I thank Thee more that all my joy 

Is touched with pain; 
That shadows fall on brightest hours. 

That thorns remain; 
So that earth's bliss may be my guide, 

And not my chain. 



VI 
CAN I LOVE GOD ? 

You ask, How can I love God? How can 
I love a Person whom I have not seen and 
cannot see? I answer by another question: 
How can you love a person whom you can see 
and have seen? 

What is it that you love in your friend? His 
eyes, mouth, nose, chin, figure? It is sometimes 
said of a woman that she has a lovely figure, or of 
a man that he has a lovely pair of whiskers, or of 
a child that she has lovely eyes. But it is not the 
figure, the whiskers, the eyes, you love. It is the 
character within, which you never have seen and 
never can see. You love the child for his lovable 
disposition; and you cannot see disposition. You 
love your friend for his courage, his patience, his 
loyalty, his truth; and courage, patience, loyalty, 

41 



42 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

and truth are invisible. A very simple illustra- 
tion should suffice to make this clear. Your friend 
dies. You go into the room where the form lies 
in the casket, and, as you gaze upon her face, you 
say, How natural she looks ! And yet your heart 
is full of sorrow and your eyes are filled with 
tears. Why? All that you can see is there. But 
what you loved is not there; the invisible spirit is 
fled forever. Love sorrows because the loved one 
is gone. And yet — what you see is not gone. 

It is this fact, that a person is to us, not what we 
see but what we do not see, that causes such con- 
tradictory judgments to be formed and expressed 
concerning the same person. I received the other 
day by the same mail two letters, one of which 
characterized Mr. Roosevelt as a bull in a china 
shop; the other, as a great leader who had awak- 
ened the conscience of the nation and was leading 
it through the jungle of passion and prejudice up 
greater heights. What was the reason for these 
different opinions concerning the same man? 
If they had seen and heard him from the same 
platform, all that was visible and audible would 



CAN I LOVE GOD ? 43 

have been the same. They had formed two 
entirely different conceptions or images of the 
same personality. One conceived a reckless bull, 
the other a courageous leader. The invisible 
personality appeared very different to the two 
correspondents. To me Mr. Roosevelt is the 
great leader, and if the first correspondent had 
known the "real Roosevelt" as well as I do, he 
also would have seen in him the great leader. 

There are two Johns who have given to the 
world two very different conceptions of God — 
the Apostle John and John Stuart Mill. The 
Apostle John says, "God is love." John Stuart 
Mill says that Natural Theology indicates that 
he is "a Being . . . who desires, and pays 
grave regard to, the happiness of his creatures, 
but who seems to have other motives of action 
which he cares more for. " These two statements 
are not as inconsistent as at first sight they seem. 
For a God of love would care more for the 
character of his creatures than for their happiness. 
But they indicate the widely differing conceptions 
of God which have prevailed in the world. There 



44 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

is a sense in which it is true that man makes God 
in his own image. From the manifestations of 
an unknown Personality in life and nature, includ- 
ing our owti experience, we form our conception 
of God; from the manifestations of our friend's 
unseen personality in his appearance, demeanour, 
and speech, we form our conception of our friend. 
The one is no more invisible than the other. 

It is easier for some than for others to realize 
the presence of an invisible personality without 
any visible manifestation of that presence. It is 
easier to do so at some times than at others. 
It is easier for those who believe, as I do, that he 
is manifested in all the higher life of the men and 
women whom I love and know, and most of all in 
the incomparable life of Jesus of Nazareth, than 
it is for those who have no such faith. When I 
say that I love God, what I mean is that I love 
the Personal Spirit who is manifested in Christ's 
life and in the life of all who are like Christ. 
What I mean when I say that I love Christ is that 
I see and love in him that divine Spirit. When 
I am asked if it is right to pray to Christ, the 



CAN I LOVE GOD ? 45 

question is meaningless to me, for my faith is that 
of John. To me Jesus Christ is "that which we 
have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, 
which we have looked upon, and our hands have 
handled, of the Word of life." I can no more 
distinguish between Christ and the invisible 
Spirit who manifested himself through Christ than 
I can distinguish between my friend in the body 
at my side and his spirit which manifests itself 
through his voice and conduct. 

But there are times when all these physical 
manifestations disappear, when it seems to me 
that their existence would be a barrier, not an aid, 
when the Presence is more present because there 
is no voice to speak and no form to see, when, to 
use Faber's phrase, he is "not so far as even to 
be near. " But, alike when this is true and when 
it is not, alike in love for God, for Christ, and for 
friend, it seems to me that true love is always for 
an unseen personality. 



VII 

RESTING IN GOD 

I am saved by faith. By that I do not mean 
that I believe certain theological propositions, 
and therefore will go to heaven when I die; and 
that you do not believe these propositions, and 
therefore will not go to heaven when you die. I 
mean that the perplexities, the discouragements, 
the sense of the uselessness of it all, which 
oppresses you, I do not share. The awful sense, 
What is it all about? Is it all worth while ? under 
the shadow of which so much of your life is spent. 
I know only by sympathetic imagination. I am 
fighting in a cause which I at least partly com- 
prehend, for a result which I feel sure we shall 
achieve, and under a Commander whom I revere 
and love. 

46 



RESTING IN GOD 47 

This difference between your view of life and 
mine I can best interpret by an illustration. 

We are soldiers in the same camp. 

We have the same duties, and suffer the same 
inconveniences. The same drum call summons 
us to get up in the morning; we sit down to the 
same camp fare for breakfast. We engage in the 
same battle; see the same tragedies of pain and 
passion; visit in the same hospital. But to you 
it is all a muddle. You do not know what it 
is all about. In the Civil War a Tennessee 
mountaineer, taken prisoner, asked his captor, 
"What are you uns coming down here to fight 
we uns for?" Your attitude of life seems to me 
somewhat like his. Life is chaos; its struggle, its 
problems, its pains, its sorrows and sins, all un- 
necessary. And who is our commander and what 
is to be the end of it all you have little idea. 
You are not even sure that there is to be any end; 
that there is any commander; that we are in camp 
for any purpose; that the enigma has any solution. 
Meantime, however, you are doing what you can 
to make life easier for others — and better, as 



48 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

well as easier; what you can to alleviate distress 
and inspire patience and courage in others. 
You are loyal to truth and duty, as you under- 
stand them; and you propose to yourself to be 
loyal, whatever is the issue, or whether or not 
there ever is an issue. 

I am no better in these respects than you are. 
Perhaps I am not your equal; not so patient, so 
heroic, so faithful. But I believe that we are 
in camp for a purpose. I believe that we have 
a Commander-in-Chief who is really commanding 
in this campaign. I believe that he understands 
what it all means and has assigned me my place 
and task. I do not understand, I do not par- 
ticularly care to understand, his great plans. I am 
quite sure that I could not understand them if 
I tried. All I want is to know enough to do well 
the duty he has assigned me. I believe that he 
not only understands but that he will succeed; 
that is, that we shall succeed; that the issue of the 
long campaign will be a kingdom of God which is 
the victory of righteousness, and its fruits peace 
and universal welfare. 



RESTING IN GOD 49 

This is not all. 

It is not only the world that is an enigma to me; 
I am an enigma to myself. The seventh chapter 
of Romans is real to me: "For what I do, I do 
without knowing what I am doing. What I desire 
to do is not what I do, but what I am averse to 
doing."* The General Confession appeals to 
me: "We have left undone those things which 
we ought to have done; and we have done those 
things which we ought not to have done; and there 
is no health in us." I ought not to have to say 
this every Sunday morning; but when Sunday 
morning comes and I look back, something of this 
I see in the week that is past. This is not all that 
I see; but I do see this. I need a Physician to 
heal me; a Commander to guide me; a Father to 
direct and discipline me. For I am but a child, 
in spite of my years. 

I believe that I have found such a Friend; and 
I have put myself in his hands. I believe that he 
understands me a great deal better than I under- 
stand myself, and that he will be able to make 



♦Romans, vii. 15: Weymouth's Translation. 



50 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

something worth while out of me. I believe that 
he can bring good out of my evil, and prevent my 
self-destruction by his wisdom and his love. 
And by this faith I am saved from useless repin- 
ings over the past, hindering fears for the future, 
and tormenting self-examinations in the present. 

This faith of mine you will perhaps call imagina- 
tion. Very well. I am not sure that trust in one's 
spiritual imagination might not serve as a good 
synonym for faith. This faith is not founded 
on reason. It is founded on experience. But 
I have tested it by my reason, and it appears to 
me to be a reasonable faith. And I trust in it, 
and live by it. And by it I am saved from 
problems too intricate for me to solve and burdens 
too heavy for me to carry. 



VIII 
TEMPTATION — STRUGGLE — VICTORY 

It was early evening. A young mother was 
sitting before an open fire in the parlour. 
Upstairs was the little girl whom she had just 
tucked in bed. The mother's alert ear heard 
a little stirring in the room overhead; then 
a patter of little feet upon the stairs and along 
the hall; and then the mother, through the 
portiere which separated the parlour from the 
dining-room, saw this childish Eve climb on a 
chair, take a big, rosy apple from the fruit dish 
in the centre of the table, and patter back through 
the hall and slowly climb the stairs again. 

It would have been so easy to stop the theft 
before it was completed, or detect the culprit with 
her booty in her hand. But this is a wise mother. 
She does not care to stop the uncompleted theft 

51 



52 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

or to detect the culprit and compel her to a shame- 
faced but reluctant confession. She wishes, not 
to stop the child from committing a sin, but to 
prevent her from becoming a sinner. She wishes, 
not to control her daughter, but to create in her 
daughter a power of self-control. She wishes any 
confession to be not compelled but voluntary, not 
reluctant but spontaneous. She waits and thinks. 
She is accustomed to think first and act afterward. 
^Yise mother! 

And as she waits, still all alert, she hears a stir- 
ring again in the room overhead, and again the 
patter of little feet upon the stair and along the 
hall. What? Is the child going to take another 
apple? No! she climbs into the chair, puts the 
purloined apple back into the fruit dish, and 
through the curtained doorway the gladdened 
mother hears the childish voice say softly, with 
what was half a sigh and half a chuckle, "That's 
one on you, Satan." And then the feet patter 
along the hall and climb the stairway, and all is 
still. And the mother is thankful in her heart that 
she did not follow her first impulse and interfere. 



TEMPTATION — VICTORY 53 

This true story, as it has been told to me, 
suggests the answer to certain questions which 
some of my Unknown Friends have lately put to 
me. For it contains four of the elements of life's 
continuous drama — temptation, sin, repentance, 
victory. The fifth element is not there — 
redemption. For the mother did not save the 
child; the child saved herself. 

Temptation is not sin. The childish desire for 
the apple was a perfectly innocent desire. Temp- 
tation involves no sin. Gluttony is sin, but 
appetite is not. Stealing is sin, but the desire to 
acquire property is not. The child desired the 
apple — ■ that was quite right. She also desired 
to be an honest little girl and to be worthy of her 
mother's approbation. That was of course 
quite right. She sinned when the desire for the 
apple mastered the desire to be an honest little 
girl and to be worthy of her mother's approbation. 

Taking the apple was not the sin; it was a 
consequence of the sin. The sin began when she 
began to indulge in the wish to get the apple which 
was not hers, and which she knew her mother 



54 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

would disapprove her taking. It was consum- 
mated when she resolved to disobey her conscience 
and disregard her mother's wish and take the 
apple. In this resolve, this act of the will, the sin 
was committed. If when she got downstairs she 
had found that the maid had locked the apples up 
in the closet and there was no apple there, still she 
would have sinned. If she had resolved to wait 
until her mother went out to make an evening call 
and then go down without fear of detection, and 
instead had fallen asleep and had wakened in the 
morning disappointed that she had not been able 
to complete her purpose, still she would have 
sinned. A sin is completed when the resolve 
to complete it is made. "Sin is lawlessness." 
It is the conscious disregard of a higher law for the 
gratification of a desire which in itself may be 
entirely innocent. It is entirely innocent for the 
little child to wish the apple. It is not innocent 
for her to desire the apple more than she wished 
to obey the voice of her conscience telling her not 
to take it. 

Being sorry for having done wrong is not repent- 



TEMPTATION — VICTORY 55 

ance, though repentance involves being sorry 
for the wrong done. If the little girl had taken 
the apple and carried it upstairs, and then had 
begun to be afraid that the apple would be missed 
and she herself detected, or, without that fear, had 
begun to feel ashamed of herself and had even 
wished that she had not taken the apple, that 
would not have been repentance. She repented 
when she resolved to take the apple back and put 
it in its place in the fruit basket. Repentance is 
not feeling, though it involves feeling; it is not 
action, though it generally involves action. 
Repentance is the resolve not to repeat the wrong 
done, and to do all that one can do to repair its 
effects. No repentance is genuine which does not 
involve an earnest desire, and, when repair is 
possible, a serious endeavour, to undo the wrong 
committed. Peter's repentance was not com- 
pleted when he went out and wept bitterly. It 
never would have been completed had he not 
accepted from his Master his recommission and 
gone out to acknowledge his Lord and confess his 
faith in him, always at the peril and eventually at 



56 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

the cost of his life. Judas Iscariot was sorry that 
he had betrayed his Master — so sorry that he 
committed suicide. But Judas Iscariot did not 
repent. 

When undoing the wrong which we have done 
involves confession, repentance involves con- 
fession. When undoing the wrong we have done 
does not involve confession, repentance does not 
involve confession. The little girl completed her 
repentance when she put the apple back. She 
might never tell her mother of her temptation, 
her sin, her repentance, her victory; she might 
even think that to do so would seem more like 
boasting than confessing. 

The child was a better child for her experience, 
and better equipped for life because she had 
passed through it. The mother might well feel 
a new pride in her little girl because her lit tic prl 
had won such a victory; and the child herself 
might well experience a feeling of exultation in 
that she had won so hard a battle. 

This incident may not, probably will not, suffice 
to answer the questions of several of my Unknown 



TEMPTATION — VICTORY 57 

Friends respecting the nature of temptation, sin, 
and repentance. But it may suggest to them 
trains of thought which will lead them to some 
light on their questions. 

And some light also on another question which 
in different forms several of them ask: Why does 
God allow this terrible drama of sin to go on 
unchecked when he might so easily stop it? 
Perhaps for the same reason that the mother 
allowed her child to steal when she might easily 
have stopped the theft. The mother was a wise 
mother; therefore she did not interfere. Perhaps 
it is because God is a wise God that he does not 
interfere. Perhaps he is more anxious to make 
virtuous men than to prevent sinful acts. Per- 
haps he sees that the only way to make men 
virtuous is to let them fight against temptation, 
and not interfere. 

Virtue is the choice of the right when we can 
choose the wrong. Virtue is not possible in a 
world in which sin is not also possible; because 
virtue is choosing to do the right when one is free 
to choose to do wrong. There is in every State 



58 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

in the Union a community of considerable size, 
the members of which work, but are not indus- 
trious; never drink, but are not temperate; do not 
steal, but are not honest; and attend divine 
service, but are not religious. It is the State's 
Prison. To be industrious one must be free to be 
idle; to be temperate one must choose not to be 
a drunkard; to be honest one must have a chance 
to cheat; and to be devout one must be at liberty 
not to worship. 

The mother was a wise mother, a very wise 
mother, not to interfere, but to wait and see 
whether the child could win the victory over 
herself by herself. What she could have done 
and what she should have done if the child had 
failed raises another question. What we can do 
and what we should do to help one another in the 
battle of life, and what the Father can do and 
what the Father does do, are questions which I 
will leave to be considered in some future letter. 



IX 
PRAYER 

We do not pray because we believe in God — 
we believe in God because we pray. 

A mother has her Quiet Hour, when she 
is alone — with herself — and therefore with an 
invisible companion. Perhaps she frames in her 
imagination some picture of the one with whom 
she is in companionship; it may be a Divine 
Person, awful — dear, yet awful; it may be Jesus 
of Nazareth, imagined as he was upon earth, talk- 
ing with his friends at the Supper Table; it may 
be the Virgin Mary, as she has been seen in 
pictorial representations of ideal womanhood; it 
may be some imagined saint, or some recently 
departed friend; it may be that there is no picture, 
no frame or sculptured image, even in her thought, 
only an impersonal personality, only an inde- 

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GO LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

finable, ineffable influence. But the companion 
is to her real; and thereby she derives an inspira- 
tion — of strength to do, patience to endure, 
wisdom to see, love to conquer — which not her 
father, her pastor, her husband, her dearest and 
nearest earthly companion, can give her. When 
she reads the saying, "The fruit of the Spirit is 
love, joy, peace, " she knows what it means. She 
is accustomed to go into the garden and gather 
these fruits. 

She does not pray because she believes in God. 
She believes in God because she prays. He is not 
to her a hypothesis to account for the creation. 
He is her most intimate Companion; the only one 
in whose presence she can lay aside all her reserve 
and open her inmost thought and feeling. 

She wishes her child to grow into this experience. 
She wishes to teach him to pray. She wishes him 
to have the very best in life which she possesses; 
and this Quiet Hour is to her the very best of life. 
So every night when the plays and tasks and 
human fellowships have come to an end for the 
day, she kneels by her child's bed, and together 



PRAYER 61 

they pray. The child repeats the prayer, "Now 
I lay me down to sleep"; or, "Jesus, tender 
Shepherd, hear me"; or "Our Father"; and with 
it the wishes of his love for others, "God bless 
papa, God bless mamma, God bless little sister." 
There is a moment of pure unselfishness; a 
moment, too, of undefinable peace. The mother 
feels an invisible companionship, which she makes 
no attempt to explain. The child catches the 
feeling from the mother and shares it with her 
without understanding it. If baby sister is sick, 
and the prayer is, "God make baby sister 
well," the burden of childish anxiety is lifted 
off the child and is lightened for the mother. 
The mother leads the child up the invisible 
ladder on which in prayer we ascend out of 
our active life, as she leads her child up the 
stairs, which he could not climb without her help. 
He wishes to do what mother does, to feel what 
mother feels; to be what mother is. And so 
unconsciously he learns to share his mother's 
Quiet Hour. He prays. The answer comes to 
him, as it comes to her, in a mysteriously quick- 



62 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

ened life. And he believes in the life because 
he possesses it; in prayer, without a philosophy of 
prayer; in God, without a definition of God. His 
faith in God, like hers, is not an opinion; it is an 
experience. 



THE SECOND COMING 

I wish Doctor Abbott would give in the Outlook his ideas on 
the Second Coming of Christ. It is a subject of much inter- 
est to all interested in religious subjects, and I can find little 
on it except opinions of Moody, Spurgeon, Mliller, etc., whose 
ideas do not appeal to my reason. 

To this problem it is not possible to give a 
definite answer, for the simple reason that it is 
not possible for us to know definitely what the 
future contains for us. It is not possible, 
because our knowledge is limited by our ex- 
perience, and the future has always transcended 
the experience of the past. 

Could Washington and his associates have 
conceived of the American Republic stretching 
from ocean to ocean? Could they have conceived 
of the tragedy of the Civil War, or the flood-tide of 
foreign immigration, or the size and power of 

63 



04 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

industrial organizations of both employers and 
employed, and the problems which these changes 
in the Republic would involve? The common 
language of our day would have been unmeaning 
to them — trades unions, trusts, combines, So- 
cialism. Even such words as railways and 
telegraphs, automobiles, and aeroplanes, would 
have been as unintelligible as Egyptian hiero- 
glyphics. 

Could the Puritans under Cromwell have 
comprehended the meaning of that great demo- 
cratic movement which they did so much to 
develop, if not to create? Could they have 
comprehended the work of Napoleon I, the de- 
stroyer of Bourbonism, or the rise and develop- 
ment of representative assemblies, or the present 
state of religious liberty, which, if they could have 
conceived it, would have seemed to them a victory 
of irreligion? 

Could the Apostles in the first century have 
forecast Christianity in the twentieth century, or 
the Christian development which intervened, with 
the conflicts, the defeats, the victories, the 



THE SECOND COMING 65 

corruptions, the idolatries, the persecutions, the 
wars, the cruelties, the heroisms, which accom- 
panied that development? Could they have con- 
ceived of Christians fighting and burning one 
another in the name of their common Master? 
The very names familiar to us would have been 
unmeaning to them — atonement and Trinity, 
Congregationalism and episcopacy, nuns and 
monks, cathedrals and cloisters and convents. 
Even such fundamental words as Bible and 
Church would have suggested to their minds a 
very different conception from that which they 
suggest to us. 

For these reasons, I have no faith in the 
attempt of men of our time to interpret the 
enigmas of the Book of Daniel and the Book of 
Revelation, or in their endeavour to construct 
from the curious and unintelligible symbols of 
those books the panorama of the future, and tell 
us when and how Jesus Christ will appear, and 
what will be the accompaniments of his coming. I 
do not believe that the writers of these symbolical 
books understood themselves what was to happen 



66 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

in the future, or expected that their readers would 
regard the Apocalypse as prewritten history. 
They understood the future as little as Wash- 
ington understood the greatness of the future 
American Republic when he WTote: "An ex- 
tension of Federal powers would make us one 
of the most happy, wealthy, respectable, and 
prosperous nations that ever inhabited the 
terrestrial globe"; or as Jefferson understood the 
tragedy of the Civil War when he wrote: "I 
tremble for my country when I reflect that 
God is just." So far as the prophets were in 
their writings dealing with the future, they wrote 
messages to inspire hope and warn of peril, and 
as messages of hope and warning their words are 
to be interpreted. To define them is to destroy 
them. 

But that is no reason for disregarding them. 

The Old Testament prophets foretold a time 
when wars would cease, the weapons of war 
would be transformed into tools of industry, 
wealth would be equitably divided and poverty 
abolished, and every one would sit under his own 



THE SECOND COMING 67 

vine and fig tree; when education would be 
universal, justice would be enforced by conscience, 
and law would go out of Zion and need no other 
enforcement than respect for the Great Lawgiver. 
But when and how this was to be brought about 
they did not know. Sometimes they seemed to 
think that the nation would be the Great De- 
liverer, sometimes some individual, sometimes 
that he would be a prince, sometimes a martyr. 
And when the Messiah came, the most devout 
students of Old Testament prophecies could 
understand neither him, nor his method, nor his 
mission. 

The Apostles, inheriting the spirit of hope from 
the Old Testament prophets, bade their followers 
also look forward to a better time to come; a new 
heaven and a new earth in which would dwell 
righteousness, a kingdom on the earth that would 
be the dwelling-place of righteousness, peace, and 
universal welfare founded on the spirit of holiness. 
It cannot be doubted that the Apostles at first 
thought that Jesus Christ would descend from 
heaven in their own generation and initiate this 



68 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

kingdom. It is not so clear that there was in the 
Master's teaching, rightly understood, any war- 
rant for this opinion. But both the Master and 
his Apostles sought to turn the face of the Church 
toward the future. "The grace of God," wrote 
the Apostle, "hath appeared to all men, teaching 
us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, 
we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in 
this present age, looking for the blessed hope, and 
the glorious appearing of the great God and our 
Saviour Jesus Christ." 

The Church has taught, with more or less 
clearness and fidelity, that Christians should live 
sober, righteous, and godly lives; but it has 
neglected its duty of teaching them that they 
should look forward to a better and clearer 
revelation of God than they now possess. Faith 
has been the belief that Jesus Christ was the 
Messiah, and lived, taught, and suffered for the 
human race. It has not been that Jesus Christ if 
the Messiah, an unseen Personality living, teach- 
ing, suffering with and for the human race to-day; 
still less that his mission will not be over until 



THE SECOND COMING 69 

humanity is prepared for a clearer revelation of 
who and what God is — a revelation yet to come. 
The Church has been looking back, not forward. 
Religion has been a memory, not a hope. Says 
Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

A new harvest, new men, new fields of thought, new powers 
call you, and an eye fastened on the past unsuns nature, 
bereaves me of hope, and ruins me with a squalid indigence 
which nothing but death can adequately symbolize. 

And again, speaking of the crucifixion: 

This great Defeat is hitherto the highest fact we have. But 
he that shall come shall do better. The mind requires a far 
higher exhibition of character, one which shall make itself 
good to the senses as well as to the soul; a success to the senses 
as well as to the soul. This was a great Defeat; we demand 
Victory. 

How and when will come this revelation to 
the senses as well as to the soul, this Victory 
growing out of the great Defeat and turning 
it into Victory? Will it come suddenly like the 
flash of lightning out of a clear sky? That would 
seem to be implied by the disciples' report of the 
Master's words: "As the lightning cometh out 
of the east and shineth even unto the west; so shall 



70 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

also the coming of the Son of man be." Or will 
it come gradually, as spring comes to the earth? 
That would seem to be implied by the parable of 
the Seed Growing Secretly. 

I do not know; I do not wish to know. I only 
know that Christianity is progressive, not station- 
ary; not the history of a life long passed away, 
but the history of a life now present and never so 
powerful as to-day; that in everyday walks a 
better to-morrow; that Christ is a living and 
present Personality, not merely a sacred memory; 
that the prayer, "Nearer, my God, to thee," 
will have its answer in the history of the race, as 
it has its answer in the experience of the indi- 
vidual; that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor 
hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive 
what God has prepared for his family of chil- 
dren, when they shall have grown to manhood. 



XI 

A SERENE SPIRIT IN A STRENUOUS AGE 

How to preserve a serene spirit in a stren- 
uous age is indeed a difficult problem. So 
many voices are repeating to us the cry of 
the conductor in the subway, "Hurry up! 
Step lively!" Life is marching at double 
quick, and we must not fall behind. It is 
an age of steam and of electricity. If we are 
to keep pace with our fellows, we must work 
like steam and think like lightning. And this 
not merely to make what men call a success, 
not merely to make as much money for ourselves 
and our families or win as good a place and as 
high honours as the men at our side. Stren- 
uous endeavour is necessary if we are to do 
our share of the world's work, if we are to be 

71 



LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

really useful citizens in a busy, hustling, racing 
Republic. 

The time is so *hort! Grant that we have the 
full threescore years and ten in which to live. 
The first twenty-five years are spent in prepara- 
tion; one third of life is gone. Twenty-five years 
follow of life at full tide. There is no dead line 
at fifty. But the tide turns at fifty, and there- 
after begins to ebb. And of the twenty-five, 
thirty-five, or forty years of active life after the 
years of preparation, one third is spent in sleep. 
Arnold Bennett has written a fascinating little 
book entitled "How to Live on Twenty-Four 
Hours a Day." But we do not have twenty- 
four hours a day. Take out what is indispensable 
for rest and meals, and we have at the outside 
scarcely fourteen hours a day. 

And there is so much to be done: a livelihood 
to be earned; a home to be kept up; children to 
be trained and educated; a city, a village, a State 
and a nation to be governed; a church to be 
maintained; the poor to be cared for; and a dis- 
ordered world to be put in order. And we are told 



SERENE SPIRIT IN A STRENUOUS AGE 73 

that we cannot delegate this work. Reformers 
cry out to us that we cannot select a few 
wise and virtuous men to govern for us; we must 
ourselves govern — must study earnestly, judge 
wisely, rule vigorously. Ministers cry out to us 
that no hierarchy, Protestant or Catholic, can do 
the work of the Church for us. Chosen leaders 
may steer, but each one of us must pull an oar. 
Good men and women are knocking at our doors 
calling on us to enlist with them in charitable, 
educational, and moral reform. They summon 
us to clean the streets, establish sanitation, 
emancipate labour, banish the liquor saloon and 
the gambling hell, succour the poor, provide child- 
hood life for the children, broaden education, 
revive the churches, carry on mission work in 
the cities, in the newly settled rural regions, in 
the old dismantled rural regions, and in foreign 
lands. 

These voices are all appealing. This work 
is all so useful, so valuable, so indispensable. 
We can neglect none of it without injury to our- 
selves and our children. What shall we do? 



74 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

Where shall we begin? Which of these voices 
shall we heed? Which of these leaders shall we 
follow? We are worse bested than was Hogarth's 
distressed musician. 

And our places of rest and refuge are taken 
from us. We used to rest at home; but now, 
returning from the office or the store, we are 
greeted by wife and daughters with calls for some 
beneficent activity, some sorely needed contribu- 
tion of money, or energy, or both. We used to 
rest in the church; but now the demand is insist- 
ent for a working church. The Church of the 
Heavenly Rest is replaced by the Church of the 
Earthly Activity. There are times when the 
text which most appeals to us is: "Oh, that I 
had wings like a dove ! then would I fly away and 
be at rest. " 

Are, then, the days of serenity ended? Must 
we regard the grace of peace as a lost grace? 
Must we postpone all hope of rest until Death 
takes us in his arms and lulls us into the dreamless 
sleep? I do not think so. I believe that we may 
cultivate a serene spirit in the midst of a strenuous 






SERENE SPIRIT IN A STRENUOUS AGE 75 

life; that we may be at peace even while we fight 
a good fight. 

Our time is not so short nor is the work which 
presses on us so great as we sometimes think. 
Our work is not to be accomplished in a single 
lifetime. Life is continuous. No generation 
achieves anything. It simply cooperates with 
generations that went before and with generations 
that are to come after in achieving something. 
The raw cotton enters the mill at one door; the 
completed sheeting goes out at the other door. 
No one pair of hands has made a sheet out of the 
cotton. The little child enters the primary 
school, he graduates from the university. No 
one teacher has made the man out of the boy. 
So it is in life. We are cooperating with our 
fellows; some of them contemporaries, some of 
them our ancestors, some of them our children 
and our children's children. It only belongs to 
us to do the work which is allotted to the present 
generation. In the Church we carry on the work 
which Paul began and which others will carry on 
after we are dead. In the State we inherit from 



76 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

the Puritans their incompleted product and carry 
forward one more process toward its completion. 

We are not responsible to purify the Nation, 
banish corruption, put an end to intemperance 
and greed, make the special interests subordinate 
to the public welfare. We are only responsible 
to do what can be done in a lifetime toward the 
work of producing a society which is obedient to 
the Ten Commandments and inspired by the 
spirit of the Golden Rule. Says Jesus, "One 
soweth, and another reapeth. I sent you to reap 
that whereon ye have not laboured: others have 
laboured, and ye are entered into their labour." 
We are not responsible to gather a harvest; we are 
only responsible to do one life's work in a process 
which requires many hundreds of such lives before 
the final achievement can be reached. 

And in this work no one of us is called upon to 
have a share in every important service, any more 
than in the army any one soldier is called upon 
to be in the cavalry, the infantry, the artillery, 
and the engineering corps; or, in the cotton factory, 
each worker is called upon to take a part in each 



SERENE SPIRIT IN A STRENUOUS AGE 77 

one of the successive operations necessary for the 
production of the sheet; or, in a school or college, 
each teacher is responsible to teach in every 
department necessary to make a completed edu- 
cation. Listen to the voices that call on you 
long enough to decide which one or which two or 
three you will heed. Then take up the one or the 
two or the three pieces of work which most ap- 
peal to you — and leave the others alone. Make 
yourself responsible for doing one thing. Hold 
yourself to a high standard, resolving to do that 
one thing well, and resolutely refuse to give hear- 
ings to other calls. 

It is important that there should be a Panama 
Canal, but that furnishes no reason why I 
should go to Panama and help to dig it. You 
are not responsible for the work for all ages, 
but only for this age. You are not responsible 
for the world, but only for your world. Choose 
the world for which you will be responsible and 
give yourself to it with singleness of service. 
If you will recognize that you are responsible only 
for the share of a single worker in the work of 



78 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

your generation, you will relieve yourself of that 
kind of perplexity which comes from attempting 
to assume impossible obligations. The man who 
thinks himself under obligations to render service 
at every opportunity which opens before him is 
hardly more sane than the man who said that he 
did not want much land, he only wanted to buy 
all the land that adjoined his own. You must 
edit your work as we edit the Outlook. We return 
many more manuscripts that we should like to 
publish than we accept. We can accept only as 
many as the limitations of our space permit us to 
print. So you are to accept only those invitations 
to work which your limitations of time and 
strength permit you to accept with hope of suc- 
cessful achievement. The fact that the other 
invitations are also for useful work is no reason 
for accepting them. 

So far you can agree with me, whatever your 
religious faith or lack of faith. You may not be 
able to agree with me in what follows. 

The workin which I amengaged is not my work, 
it is my Father's work. He has assigned it to me. 



SERENE SPIRIT IN A STRENUOUS AGE 79 

To him I am responsible for the way in which 
I carry it on. All that he asks of me is my best 
endeavour. I am not under obligation to succeed; 
I am only under obligation to do as well as I can 
that very little portion of humanity's common 
task which he has allotted to me. From 1870 to 
1887 I was preaching to a village congregation 
which rarely numbered over seventy-five. Then 
I was called to Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, to 
preach to a congregation which numbered from 
fifteen hundred to two thousand. I was some- 
times asked if I did not feel it a great responsibility 
to stand in Henry Ward Beecher's pulpit and 
preach in that historic church to such a congrega- 
tion. I answered then, and I answer now, No. 
The responsibility of preaching to fifteen hundred 
people is no greater than the responsibility of 
preaching to seventy-five. The responsibility 
is the same in both cases: it is to speak the truth 
as God gives me to see the truth, and to speak it 
as simply and as clearly as I can, without fear and 
without favour. In fact, I never feel my responsi- 
bility quite so keenly as when I am talking to an 



80 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

individual who has come to me with some problem 
of his spiritual life and I realize the difficulty of 
clearing away the prejudices, his and mine, which 
shadow our minds, and make real intercom- 
munication of life between us difficult. 

But I am not merely working under my Father's 
orders, I am working with my Father's comrade- 
ship. We are working together, and I am respon- 
sible only to do my share in our partnership work. 
This is what Jesus Christ means when he says: 
"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy 
laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke 
upon you." A yoke is an instrument for doing 
work. It is also an instrument for uniting two 
workers together. If I take Christ's work upon 
me, I am yoked to him and we do the work to- 
gether. This is what Paul means when he says, 
"We are labourers together with God." I plant 
a seed in the garden; nature produces the flower. 
I plant a thought in a human soul; God produces 
the character. 

I send this letter out, not knowing that it will 
help you; not knowing whether it will help any 



SERENE SPIRIT IN A STRENUOUS AGE 81 

one. To give it any fruitage in a human life is 
beyond my power. That is God's part of our 
partnership. My responsibility is ended when 
I have written it and sent it forth on its mission. 
I shoot it, like Longfellow's arrow, into the air. 
Whether I shall ever find it again in the heart of 
a friend, it is not for me to know. It is enough 
that He knows; and so I can let it go on its errand 
with a serene spirit. 



XII 
THE PRIVILEGE OF BEING A MINISTER 

I sympathize with you in your disappoint- 
ment at being prevented from going into the 
ministry. For it affords not only a very useful 
but a very happy life; perhaps no more useful 
than other lives, but, to my thinking, of all 
lives the happiest — to one who is fitted for it. 

In a village a hundred disciples of Jesus Christ, 
who possess something of his spirit and wish to 
carry on the work which he has left his followers 
to complete, unite for that purpose and form a 
church. Whether this church is part of a univer- 
sal church and is a divine organization, or is a 
local body, human in its form and method, and 
divine only in the spirit which actuates it, has 
been and still is hotly debated. Into that debate 
I do not enter. The purpose of those who con- 

82 



BEING A MINISTER 83 

stitute the church is the same in either case. They 
can do much of Christ's work incidentally in their 
daily vocations: the lawyer in administering 
justice, the doctor in healing the sick, the teacher 
in instructing her pupils, the merchant in minister- 
ing to the physical needs of the community, the 
home-keeper in managing the home. 

But they wish to do more than this. They 
wish to do something, directly and immediately, 
to pervade the community with the principles 
of the Sermon on the Mount and the spirit of the 
Good Samaritan. They look about for some man 
who they think is by temperament and training 
specially equipped to give himself wholly and 
unreservedly to the good offices of faith, hope, 
and love. They say to him: We will provide 
for your daily needs. We will give you food, 
clothing, and shelter for yourself and your family. 
You may dismiss from your mind the cares which 
occupy the main portion of our thoughts. You 
may henceforth accept literally the Master's 
injunction: "Take no thought for your life, 
what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet 



84 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

for your body, what ye shall put on." We will 
take that thought for you. We invite you to 
carry on the work which the Master intrusted 
to the twelve in his lifetime; to do in this vil- 
lage what they did in Palestine: "And as ye 
go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is 
at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, 
raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have 
received, freely give." 

You may think I idealize. Perhaps I do. 
There are churches which seem to regard the 
minister as a hired man, employed simply to 
serve them; which think that time given by him 
to the community is taken from them. There 
are churches which do not keep their promises, 
which pay their minister his salary very irregu- 
larly, or not at all. But I have been for fifty 
years in the ministry; I have never in my life 
made a bargain with a church; 1 have always 
acted on this theory of the minister's relation to 
the church, and of myself as their minister to 
serve not them but the community in which they 
dwell; I have ministered in the West and in the 



BEING A MINISTER 85 

East, in a little village, in a moderate-sized city, 
and in the great metropolis; and sometimes to 
churches that were decidedly poor; never to a 
wealthy church. And I have never found a 
church that failed to respond to this view of our 
relationship, or to provide according to its means 
for my support. When it could not provide 
enough, I remembered Paul's example and pro- 
vided what I needed by my own industry. 

To be thus freed from the drudgery which is a 
part of most industrial vocations, and to give one's 
self with an untroubled mind and undivided 
attention simply to doing good, entirely regardless 
of the question whether it pays, is — at least so 
I have found it — a delightful life. It is true that 
the minister will be sure to have some unreason- 
able parishioners. So the lawyer will have some 
unreasonable clients, the doctor some unreasonable 
patients, the merchant some unreasonable cus- 
tomers, and the farmer some weather that will 
seem to him very unreasonable. And the min- 
ister will not always be reasonable himself. But, 
making full allowance for all hindrances and 



86 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

drawbacks, the life of the ministry, rightly taken, 
is a very joyous one. The minister who does not 
find it so had better look at home for the fault 
before looking anywhere else. 

This life is closed to you. What then? There 
is no time to waste in self-pity. There are other 
doors of Christian service open to you. The 
same mail which brought me your letter brought 
me one from a layman whose daily life is very 
arduous, who lives in a small village and is a 
member of an inconspicuous church. One sen- 
tence of his letter would be worth printing on 
every church calendar and framed and hung up 
in every parish house: 

The world has seen wtiat God axd Martin 
Luther have doxe, what God and John Calvin 
have done, what God and John Wesley have 
done, what god and d. l. moody have done, 
AND what God and many others have done, 

BUT THE WORLD HAS YET TO SEE WHAT GOD AND 
ALL HIS PEOPLE CAN DO. 

We have treated the church as though it were 
simply a school, and the minister simply a teacher. 



BEING A MINISTER 87 

We have treated religion and theology as syno- 
nyms, and substituted talking about religion for 
practising it. We have summed up the whole 
of Christ's commission by the word "preach," 
and we have left out "heal the sick, cleanse the 
lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils. " We have 
incited the laity to work, but the only work we 
have given them to do is the work of religious 
teaching and public worship on a small scale, in 
the prayer-meeting and the Sunday-school. There 
are a great many laymen who have neither 
the temperament nor the training for public 
teaching or public prayer; we blame them because 
they do not take up work for which they are not 
prepared, but which is the only work that is 
offered to them. The church is not merely a 
school; it is an industrial organization. The min- 
ister is not merely a teacher; he is a captain of 
spiritual industry. But the industry which ought 
to be carried on by others under general guid- 
ance and inspiration has been thrown on him; and, 
dividing his energies between teaching and admin- 
istration, he is not able to do either very well. 



88 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

The Church of Christ does not want more 
ministers nearly so much as it wants more lay- 
men; not passengers, but crew; not an army look- 
ing on to see how David will fight, but an army 
which will follow David into the battle; not senti- 
mentalists, but men of devout spirit inspiring 
practical philanthropy; men who are not only 
harmless as doves, but also wise as serpents; men 
of worldly wisdom, who will use in the service of 
the Church their practical good sense in making 
it effectual for promoting the kingdom of heaven 
in the community, and helping to make that 
Kingdom truly "at hand." 

There is plenty of opportunity for you in 
Christian ministering, though you may never be 
a Christian minister. 



XIII 
LIFE PREACHING 

Do you think it a person's duty to speak to every one with 
whom he comes in contact about becoming a Christian? Some 
say that this should be done by every Christian. It seems to 
me that earnest living for Christ from day to day has greater 
influence for righteousness than talking. E. L. C. 

The minister here — as well as ministers in many other 
places, I believe — is always insisting on public prayer and 
testimony from everybody; also the duty of constantly 
preaching to one's friends and acquaintances. This is re- 
garded as the chief proof of conversion. Little or no em- 
phasis is laid upon a practical Christianity of kind words and 
deeds; on unselfish and upright living. Do you regard such 
teaching and practice as sane and reasonable? O. E. U. 

It is unfortunate that religion has come 
to be tabooed in ordinary social conversation. 
We can talk about politics, business, literature, 
music, art, our homes, our friends, the weather; 
but we seem to regard the religious life as 
too sacred to be brought into common con- 

89 



90 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

versation. This may be partly because of 
reserve, partly because we fear the suspicion 
of ostentation, partly because we have reacted 
against the Phariseeism which delights in ex- 
hibitory piety. But, w T hatever the cause, the 
result is unfortunate. There is no more reason 
why religious convictions should be excluded 
from common conversation than political con- 
victions; no more reason why we should tacitly 
forbid all reference to our religious life than why 
we should put a similar prohibition on art, litera- 
ture, or domestic life. But the questions of our 
correspondents are not, Would it be better for 
Christians to be more free in the natural expres- 
sion of their religious faith? but, Is it the duty 
of every Christian to set himself to work to 
impart his religious life to his neighbour, either 
by public address or personal conversation? To 
both these questions I answer decidedly, No! 

It is no more the duty of every man to attempt 
to cure sick souls than to attempt to cure insane 
minds or diseased bodies. It is the duty of every 
Christian to lead a Christlike life. This means 



LIFE PREACHING 91 

doing unto others as we would have others do 
unto us; it means returning good for evil, loving 
our enemies, blessing those that curse us, doing 
good to those that hate us; it means counting 
him the greatest who renders the most unselfish 
service; laying down our lives for others, as Christ 
laid down his life for us; loving others as he loved 
us. But it does not mean assuming to be the 
spiritual director of our neighbour, assuming to tell 
him what he ought to do and what he ought not 
to do, assuming to dictate to him his duty or 
point out to him the path in which he should walk. 
On the contrary, it is a good general rule in life, 
though by no means a universal one, not to offer 
to others unasked advice, unless they stand in such 
relation to us that the unasked advice is expected, 
as it is by a pupil from his teacher and by a child 
from his parent. Even the minister will do better 
who succeeds in inducing his people to call upon 
him with their spiritual problems and their 
intellectual doubts, than he who goes after them 
and demands their confidence. 

It is no more every man's duty to speak in 



92 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

prayer-meeting than it is every man's duty to 
preach in the pulpit; and no man should pray in 
public under compulsion. Prayer should always 
be a spontaneous and willing offering to God. 
I remember very w r ell the humiliating experience 
in which I learned this lesson. It w T as in my first 
pastorate. I had the impression then that every 
Christian ought to be able to speak and pray in 
prayer-meeting, and that it was his duty to do so. 
I urged this duty upon a man who had just joined 
the church. Very reluctantly he undertook a 
task for which he was not fitted. He broke down 
in the middle of his prayer, and I finished it for 
him by repeating the Lord's Prayer. I do not 
know whether he ever recovered from the humilia- 
tion of that night, but it was I who should have 
been, and was, humiliated, and I resolved then 
that I never would urge any person to pray or to 
speak in public against his will, and I have never 
done so since. 

Private conversation is even more difficult than 
public speech. There are some who have the 
sympathy, the tact, the colloquial skill, to ap- 



LIFE PREACHING 93 

proach comparative strangers in personal ap- 
peal without offending them; but to do this 
requires tact, sympathy, and colloquial skill. 
If you will read with unprejudiced attention any 
one of the Gospels, you will find that Jesus 
Christ rarely obtruded the subject of personal 
religion upon any individual in personal conver- 
sation. Nicodemus came to him for instruction. 
The woman at the well opened the conversa- 
tion with him, and he turned it naturally and 
easily into a religious channel. The rich young 
ruler came running to him, knelt down in the 
way, and asked him, "What shall I do to in- 
herit eternal life?" His religious conversations 
at the dinner-table grew naturally and easily out 
of some incident, as in the case of the woman who 
anointed his feet, or out of some words spoken 
by another, as in the case of the guest who said 
"Blessed are they who shall eat bread in the 
kingdom of God. " I doubt whether there is any 
incident in the Gospels which indicates that 
Jesus Christ ever forced the subject of spiritual 
life upon others in personal conversation; and his 



94 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

public teaching was ordinarily delivered under 
circumstances which made it always easy for 
those to go away who did not care to hear him. 
He used neither physical nor moral pressure to 
force men into the kingdom of God. 

It is the duty of every man, whether he calls 
himself Christian or not, to do what he can to make 
this both a better and a happier world, to lend a 
helping hand to his neighbour, to make his life 
a life of service, to be rich in good works. The 
farmer does this when he gathers the fruits of the 
earth and markets them, for so he is feeding the 
hungry. The mechanic does this when he invents, 
makes, or uses machinery to do the world's 
drudgery, for so he is releasing men from drudgery 
and making possible for them a higher, freer, and 
more joyous life. The doctor does this in reliev- 
ing suffering, curing disease, preventing epi- 
demics. The lawyer does this in interpreting and 
administering social justice. The teacher does 
this in gathering out of the experience of the past 
light to be shed on the pathway of the future. 
The minister does this by holding up to those who 



LIFE PREACHING 95 

will listen ideals of truth, purity, and love, by 
which others may be inspired and which they 
may follow. 

But it is no more the duty of the farmer to hold 
up the ideals of the pulpit by speech than it is the 
duty of the minister to raise the fruits of the earth 
to feed the hungry. Paul has expressed this very 
clearly: "Having then gifts differing according 
to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, 
let us prophesy according to the proportion of 
faith; or ministry, let us wait on our ministering; 
or he that teacheth, on teaching; or he that 
exhorteth, on exhortation; he that giveth, let 
him do it with simplicity; he that ruleth, with 
diligence; he that showeth mercy, with cheer- 
fulness. " 

My correspondents are both right. "Earnest 
living for Christ from day to day has greater 
influence for righteousness than talking." Our 
emphasis should be laid "upon a practical 
Christianity of kind words and deeds; on unselfish 
and upright living." 

But these kind words and deeds must be the 



96 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

natural fruit of a real, sincere Christian life. 
Not what we say, not what we do, but what we 
are, exerts the greatest influence. Thomas Carlyle 
writes to John Sterling about four months before 
the latter 's death from consumption took place: 
"If you were never able to go through any active 
exertion, or to write a single line except an 
occasional letter, or to exercise any influence 
over mankind, except the influence of your 
thoughts and feelings upon your children and 
upon those by whom you are personally known 
and valued, you would still be, I sincerely think, 
the most useful man I know. . . . There are 
certainly few persons living who are capable of 
doing so much good by their indirect and uncon- 
scious influence as you are, and I do not believe 
you have ever had an adequate conception of the 
extent of the influence you possess, and the 
quantity of good which you produce by it. " 

What we do unconsciously by our character is 
vastly more important than what we do w r ith 
deliberate purpose by either our words or our 
deeds. 



XIV 
RELIGIOUS CONVERSATION 

A correspondent writes to me saying: 
"Some time I wish you might be interested to 
write in the Outlook about the disinclination to 
ask for moral advice, and about a man's dis- 
inclination to talk to another about such things 
as duty, right, conduct, etc. It would seem as 
though a college professor would find it very 
easy and suitable to talk to boys, or to a boy, 
about good and evil, and that there is no more 
important subject to be found. Yet how often, 
when you see it tried, you observe the young 
men look down, grow sheepish, and observe a 
cessation of the spirit of intimacy that was 
there before. I fancy the Greek youths looked 
their tutors frankly in the eye when right 
and wrong were spoken of. Here we are all, 

97 



98 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

minister and teacher, father and citizen, all 
professing the same work: a better quality of 
manhood; yet everywhere we see this remark- 
able hesitation to go directly about it. One of 

the professors of University was recently 

talking with me about the peculiarity of college 
preachers who come to that university. Some 
who can make stirring appeals to men in masses 
fail in individual cases. 'But,' he said, * Doctor 
Abbott has both kinds of ability. Boys will 
confer with him and will return for other confer- 
ences. ' It seems to me that you would render a 
very signal service if you would take a look at 
your way of doing this and then write a few 
pointed suggestions to preachers, college men, and 
high-school teachers, on the necessity of direct 
moral teaching and the way to go at it. " 

I have published this letter at length, though 
not in full, because it will be quite as interesting 
to the readers of the Outlook as anything which 
I can write in reply to it. The problem it presents 
is a difficult one. I do not pretend to offer any 



RELIGIOUS CONVERSATION 99 

solution. I can only make, for the benefit of 
parents, teachers, and pastors, such contribution 
toward its solution as may be furnished by the 
experience of one person. 

I have long been convinced that one cause of 
the apparent failure of efficiency in the church is 
the diminution of pastoral service. Neither 
eloquence of preaching in the pulpit, nor skill of 
administration in the parish, can take the place 
of personal contact between the preacher and his 
people. If I had the time and strength, I would 
rather talk with five hundred individual inquirers 
who sought me out for conference, than preach 
to a congregation of five thousand auditors who 
came to listen and went away, many of them to 
forget what they had heard. In these personal 
conferences the pastor or teacher comes in direct 
contact with the individual soul. He knows the 
doubts, the difficulties, the dangers, of the indi- 
vidual. He endeavors to meet those difficulties 
with his solutions, those doubts with his argu- 
ments, those dangers with his counsels; and he 
finds, if he is open-minded, wherein the solutions 



100 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

fail to solve, the arguments fail to convince, and 
the counsels fail to guide. He gets just what he 
does not get in the pulpit, the response of the 
soul, and knows, at least in a little degree, wherein 
he has succeeded, wherein he has failed. 

The ordinary method of pastoral visiting 
apparently in vogue in our day seems to me of 
very trifling use. The pastor goes to the house, 
makes his formal call, and departs. He rarely 
sees the men, and not infrequently the women are 
sorry he has come and glad when he has gone. 
He has no right to demand their confidence, and, 
interrupted perhaps in their social engagements 
or their domestic duties, they are, at the time of 
the call, in no mood to give him their confidence. 
He perhaps establishes a little social relationship 
which makes his ministry on the next Sabbath 
slightly more effective. Rarely can he do more 
than this. 

In college conferences the conditions are re- 
versed. The student comes to the preacher. He 
comes because he wants to see the preacher, 
because he has some question to bring to the 



RELIGIOUS CONVERSATION 101 

preacher, because at least he has some wish for per- 
sonal contact with the preacher. The door of his 
own soul is opened, and the preacher, if he has skill 
and sympathy, may enter in. In this respect the 
custom of the Roman Catholic Church is much 
wiser than the custom of the Protestant churches. 
In the Protestant churches the pastor goes to 
the people; in the Roman Catholic Church the 
people come to the pastor. In the confessional 
he meets them self-prepared for the conference, 
and seeking it at his hands. 

At the same time, I envy the minister who is 
able to go from house to house and bring about, 
in this method of visitation, personal, intimate, 
spiritual conferences. I know one clergyman 
who frequently preaches in a university where 
I have also been wont to preach. Whenever he 
goes there, I am told that he looks up the students 
from his city, visits them in their rooms, and 
through these visits gets acquainted with other 
students as well. I wish I had his ability. I am 
sure that I should fail if I undertook to imitate 
his example. I should be shy of going to the 



102 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

student's room, lest I should find myself unwel- 
come, and perhaps come at a time when he was 
busy with his work, or at a time when he was 
enjoying some companionship that he did not 
wish interrupted, or under some other circum- 
stance which would make the visit an unwelcome 
intrusion. I have, therefore, simply opened the 
way for students who wished a conference with 
me, and limited my pastoral work in schools and 
colleges to those who, when the way was opened, 
sought an interview. 

It is not enough, however, that the door of the 
room is opened and a social welcome given to the 
inquirer. The door of the mind must be opened, 
and whatever his doubt, his difficulty, his tempta- 
tion, or even his sin, he must find a welcoming 
reception. The author of "Fraulein Schmidt 
and Mr. Anstruther" puts this matter very well. 

"For two years, from sixteen to eighteen, I was 
earnest, prayerful, humbly seeking after right- 
eousness. Then one day, when questionings 
had come upon me that my conscience could not 
approve, I went to the pastor who had prepared 



RELIGIOUS CONVERSATION 103 

me, as confidently as I would go with a toothache 
to a dentist, and bared my sensitive conscience 
to him, and begged him to have my thoughts 
arranged and my doubts and questionings settled. 
To my amazement and extreme fright I beheld 
him shocked, angry, hardly able to endure hearing 
me tell all I had been wondering. It seemed very 
strange. I sat at last with downcast eyes, silent, 
ashamed, my heart shrunk back into reserve and 
frost. I was not being helped; I was being scolded, 
and bitterly scolded. At last at the door some 
special word of blame stung me to heat, and I 
cried: 'Herr Pastor, when my tongue is bad 
and I show it to a doctor, he gives me a pill. 
Are you not the doctor of my spirit? Why, then, 
when I come to you to be healed, do you, instead 
of giving me medicine, so cruelly rate me?' " 

A great many young people are kept from their 
pastors by the belief that their pastors cannot 
understand them, and perhaps will not even try. 
In my pastoral work with students I have been 
aided by the fact that almost all the doubts which 
perplex them have perplexed me. I am consti- 



104 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

tutionally a skeptic, and also constitutionally a 
mystic. If to any of my readers this statement 
seems inconsistent, I can only say that most of us 
are made up of inconsistencies. I have never 
been able to believe anything simply because 
other people do, and a command to me to believe 
has always awakened my doubts. I do not think 
that any purely intellectual opinion is ever a sin. 
Intellectual opinions may grow out of sin; intel- 
lectual opinions may lead to sin; but an intel- 
lectual opinion is neither a sin nor a virtue. 
Sin and virtue lie solely in the will. The desire 
to know the truth and to follow the truth 
to whatever disagreeable conclusions the truth 
may lead, is a virtue. The desire not to know 
the truth, the willingness to follow a falsehood 
because it will lead one in pleasant paths, is a sin. 
When, therefore, any student comes to me with 
a sincere desire to know the truth, the fact that 
his point of view is absolutely different from 
mine does nothing whatever to impair our fellow- 
ship. We are one in our desire to know the truth 
and to follow the truth wherever it will lead us. 



RELIGIOUS CONVERSATION 105 

A student once came to me saying that he had 
been a member of the church, but he had lost 
his faith — first in the church, then in the Bible, 
then in the spiritual life, until he did not know 
whether he believed there was a God in the world 
or a spirit in the body. I said to him, "If there is 
not a God in the world you want to know it. 
If there is not a spirit in the body you want to 
know that also. Whatever the truth is, let us try 
to find it. " I think he was surprised at getting 
such a word of welcome from a minister. And 
when we had talked an hour and a half, and 
I had given him my reasons for believing that 
there is a God in the world, and there is a spirit 
in the body, he went away, if not convinced, at 
least with the door opened to him, through which 
he might recover the faith which he had lost. 

A third advantage which I have possessed, 
which the ordinary pastor does not possess, has 
been the fact that most of my conferences have 
been with comparative strangers. Young men 
and young women in a school or college will come 
to a visiting preacher with a freedom with which 



10G LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

they will not come to their own pastor, just as a 
boy will often go to a comparative stranger with 
a freedom with which he will not go to his own 
father, and perhaps still more, a girl will go to a 
stranger with a freedom with which she will not 
go to her own mother. The letters which in this 
way I am answering through the columns of the 
Outlook come to me from unknown friends, and 
they write to me more freely because I am un- 
known to them. Early in my college pastoral 
work I discontinued the habit of asking the name 
of the student who called upon me, and quickly 
forgot it when it was volunteered. It is needless 
perhaps to say that the secrets in these personal 
interviews have been kept as sacredly as if I were 
a Roman Catholic priest, and though the letters 
from unknown friends are sometimes printed, the 
name is never given, nor anything by which the 
unknown friend could be identified. 

The three suggestions then which I venture to 
make to parents, teachers, and pastors, in reply 
to the letter given above, are these: 

Make it easy for any one who wishes an inter- 



RELIGIOUS CONVERSATION 107 

view with you to get the interview. Count such 
sacred fellowship always as of the highest impor- 
tance. Do not begrudge the time given to it nor 
regret the interruption which it involves. 

Meet the inquirer with an open mind and a 
sympathetic heart. Do not resent any question 
of doubt or any temptation or sin confessed. 
If one comes to a teacher or pastor to confess 
a sin, it is because the sin is a burden. If we are 
to do anything for the one confessing we must 
put ourselves in his place and bear his burden 
with him; we must get his point of view and share 
his perplexity with him. 

Regard all such interviews as a sacred confi- 
dence, never under any circumstances to be 
reported to another, and not even treasured in 
your own memory. 



XV 
THE SABBATH PROBLEM 

A college boy and a hard student asks me, writes a corre- 
spondent, " Why can't I play tennis on Sunday? " As a matter 
of fact, I do not see any harm in it, for he lives in the country, 
where the question of example is not involved — if it is to be 
considered. The act of playing tennis is innocent enough. 
But my Puritanical upbringing asks, "Is this a conscious 
disregard of a higher law?" Any thoughtful boy knows that 
it is less hurtful than spending the afternoon in idle chatter 
with other young people. His problem has to do only with 
tennis playing — or similar diversions — at home only. 

Charles Dickens in a paper to be found 
in the 34th volume of his collected works, 
published by the Scribners, describes a Sunday 
scene which he once observed in the west of 
England, in a small village distant about seventy 
miles from London. In the morning he attended 
service in the village church, a low-roofed 
building with small arched windows through 

108 






THE SABBATH PROBLEM 109 

which the sun's rays streamed in. "The im- 
pressive service of the Church of England was 
spoken — not merely read — by the gray-headed 
minister, and the responses delivered by his 
auditors, with an air of sincere devotion fcs 
far removed from affectation or display as 
from coldness or indifference." At the close 
of the service the villagers saluted the minister 
as he passed, and some of them held brief 
conferences with him. In the evening, about 
half an hour before sunset, Mr. Dickens walked 
out toward the church again, was surprised 
to hear the hum of voices and occasionally 
a shout of merriment from the meadow beyond 
the churchyard, and found the boys and young 
men of the place engaged in an animated game of 
cricket, while the older people were scattered 
about, some watching the game, some gathering 
flowers, some engaged in social conversation. 
"I was," he says, "in the very height of the 
pleasure which the contemplation of this scene 
afforded me, when I saw the old clergyman 
making his way toward us. I trembled for an 



110 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

angry interruption to the sport, and was almost 
on the point of crying out, to warn the cricketers 
of his approach; he was so close upon me, however, 
that I could do nothing but remain still, and 
anticipate the reproof that was preparing. What 
was my agreeable surprise to see the old gentle- 
man standing at the stile, with his hands in his 
pockets, surveying the whole scene with evident 
satisfaction! And how dull I must have been 
not to have known till my friend the grandfather 
(who, by-the-by, said he had been a wonderful 
cricketer in his time) told me, that it was the 
clergyman himself who had established the whole 
thing: that it was his field they played in; and 
that it was he who had purchased the stumps, 
bats, ball, and all!" 

This Sabbath scene — reverent worship in 
which the whole community united in the rnorn- 
ing, innocent recreation in which the old and 
young partook in the afternoon with the cor- 
dial approval of the church and the minister — 
appears to me to furnish an ideal of Sabbath 
observance. 



THE SABBATH PROBLEM 111 

The Sabbath question is two questions: What 
ought the law to forbid? What ought Christian 
example to commend? 

The standard for the law is set by the Fourth 
Commandment. The Fourth Commandment 
forbids work; and it forbids nothing else. It 
requires rest; and it requires nothing else. There 
is no suggestion in this Commandment of any 
religious service, no suggestion of any prohibition 
of innocent and healthful recreation. The day 
is, indeed, a day to be kept holy to the Lord, but 
holiness to the Lord is not inconsistent with 
festivity and rejoicing. That it was not so 
regarded by the ancient Hebrews is evident from 
an interesting incident recorded in the book of 
Nehemiah. The people were brought together 
in a kind of primitive camp-meeting to hear the 
Law of God read to them, and interpreted. 
A pulpit was constructed and preachers were 
appointed to conduct the service. "So they read 
in the book of the Law of God distinctly, and 
gave the sense, and caused them to understand 
the reading" — not a bad example for modern 



Ill LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

preaching. But when the people, moved by the 
solemnity of the occasion, wept, the preachers 
bade them not weep. "This day is holy unto the 
Lord your God," they said, "mourn not nor weep. 
Go your way. Eat the fat, and drink the sweet, 
and send portions unto them for whom nothing 
is prepared, for this day is holy unto our Lord. 
Neither be ye sorry, for the joy of the Lord is 
your strength." And it is added that "the 
people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to 
send portions, and to make great mirth, because 
they had understood the words that were declared 
unto them." 

There is some reason for believing that this day 
was a Sabbath day, but w T hether it was or not, it 
was a day holy unto the Lord, and the example 
set by Nehemiah and his preachers in sending the 
people away to festivity, rejoicing, and mirth, 
after the sacred service of the morning, is one to 
be commended to the consideration of those who 
go to the Bible to learn what the Sabbath is for. 

We ought by law to protect the workingman's 
right to his day of rest. It is true that all work 



THE SABBATH PROBLEM 113 

cannot be stopped on the Sabbath day. The 
steamer cannot anchor in mid-ocean, nor the 
train halt in the middle of the continent, nor the 
hotels close their doors and cease to serve food 
to their guests, nor, I believe, the iron furnaces 
shut down. But work should be diminished, and 
as far as possible should cease, on this day. The 
law should provide that every workingman should 
have one day for rest and recreation in every week, 
as it should provide for him adequate hours of 
rest and recreation in every day. But it should 
not determine for him how he should employ 
either the protected day in the week or the pro- 
tected hours in the day. This is a question every 
man should be left free to determine for himself. 

The Sabbath law should simply prohibit 
unnecessary employment and such forms of 
activity, whether work or play, whether religious 
or secular, as disturb the day of rest for the com- 
munity. It may legitimately prohibit the paid 
ball game, with its gate receipts, its great crowd, 
its inevitable disturbance of the day's quiet. 
But it may equally legitimately prohibit a 



114 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

procession, whether secular or religious, from 
making such use of the streets as disturbs the 
quiet either of worshippers in the churches or 
of householders in their homes. The whole 
function of law is not to enforce a religious 
obligation on the people, but to provide the people 
with the freedom which will enable them to enjoy 
their worship and their rest undisturbed. 

The question of Christian example is different. 
To the Christian the Sabbath is a day of inspira- 
tion as well as of rest and recreation. He uses 
the rest of this day and the relief it brings him 
from ordinary weekly toil, for ministry to the 
higher life. He may find this ministry in the 
church service, or in reading and reflection at 
home, or in quiet communion with his own soul 
and with God in the field or the forest; but he uses 
it for something more than mere relaxation. It 
furnishes him an opportunity for that repose, 
both of body and of spirit, without which the 
best health of the body and the best develop- 
ment of the spirit are impossible. 

But there is no reason why this use of a part of 



THE SABBATH PROBLEM 115 

the Sabbath should be regarded as inconsistent 
with the use of another part of the Sabbath for 
mere relaxation and recreation, provided such 
form of relaxation and recreation are selected as 
do not entail unnecessary work on others and do 
not violate the Sabbath rest of others. The day- 
should be made one of rest and gladness, a festival, 
not a fast day, a day of liberty, not a day of 
bondage; and my own belief is that if the ministers, 
the churches, the parents, the saintly people who 
find great rest and refreshment in the spiritual 
uses of the day, would join with the rest of the 
community in making a part of the day available 
for innocent rest and recreation, they would make 
the whole day better serve both themselves and 
their neighbours. 

The Sabbath question is part of a much larger 
question and cannot be solved by itself. So long 
as we think that religion is something apart from 
life, that it is religious to pray and irreligious to 
play, religious to weep and irreligious to laugh, 
so long we shall think there is a certain incongruity 
in attempting to mingle worship and recreation 



116 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

in the same day; so long we shall think the day is 
given to God if it is devoted to Bible and Church, 
and is given to ourselves and to the world if it is 
given to playing games. To Charles Kingsley 
life seemed so full of God that he writes, "I see no 
inconsistency in making my sermons while I am 
cutting wood and no 'bizarrerie' in talking one 
moment to one man about the points of a horse, 
and the next moment to another about the mercy 
of God to sinners. " When life becomes thus full 
of God to us, when we realize the full meaning of 
the truth that God has entered into human life 
in order that human life may become divine, 
when we remember that Jesus Christ in his 
parables found his ideals of human character in 
the merchantman doing business, the fisherman 
working with his boats and his nets, the farmer 
sowing his seed, the steward administering an 
estate, and compared himself to one playing in 
the market-place, that the children might dance 
to his music, we shall be able to realize that there 
is nothing irreligious in innocent recreations on a 
day given by the Father to his children and to be 



THE SABBATH PROBLEM 117 

consecrated by them to preparation for higher 
and holier living throughout the week. 

I have not attempted to give a direct answer 
to your question, because a direct answer is 
impossible. " Circumstances alter cases. " I wish 
that the churches and the ministers acted 
in the spirit of the church and the minister 
described by Charles Dickens in the incident 
recounted above. But where they do not, where 
the religious feeling of the community is strongly 
opposed to all recreation on the Sabbath, some 
attention must be paid to that sentiment. The 
Sabbath should be a day of liberty; but our 
liberty is not to be used needlessly to wound or 
offend even the prejudices of our fellow-men. 
Whether in any given community it is right to 
play lawn tennis on Sunday depends, therefore, 
in part upon the sentiment of the better class in 
that community. It also depends in part upon 
the weekday work of the individual, and upon 
the opportunities for service of others which 
the Sabbath may afford him. Perhaps the 
college boy to whom my correspondent refers 



118 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

can get his out-of-door recreation by acting 
as Scout Master to village boys who have little 
inspiring companionship; perhaps he can render 
service by taking a class in an afternoon Sunday 
School or mission; perhaps he can render service 
in making the Sabbath an enjoyable one to the 
home. All these questions must be taken into 
consideration. I can only say that I see nothing 
necessarily inconsistent with either the Jew T ish or 
the Christian conception of the Sabbath, in such 
social fellowship and innocent recreation as do 
not entail serious labour upon others. 

Nor have I undertaken to solve the Sabbath 
question. The question what shall we do with 
our Sabbath cannot be considered apart from the 
larger question, What shall we do with our life? 
A little child once asked his mother, "Is the 
Sabbath the Lord's Day?" "Yes, " she replied. 
"And has he given us the other six days for our 
own? " " Ye-es — why — yes, I suppose so, " she 
replied. "Wasn't it good of him," said the 
child, "to keep only one day for himself and give 
us the other six days for ourselves?" This 



THE SABBATH PROBLEM 119 

childish conception is not uncommon, and wher- 
ever it is entertained the Sabbath question is 
insoluble. No man who works all the week under 
such pressure that he wakes Sunday morning 
exhausted in mind and body is in any condition 
for the spiritual refreshment of the church services. 
No one who works all the week trying to get all 
that he can out of his fellow-men, is in any condi- 
tion on the Sabbath to join in sincere, genuine 
reverence for One who said, "He that will be 
greatest among you let him be servant of all." 
We can never learn how to rest in God on the 
Sabbath unless we have learned how to work for 
God throughout the week. 



XVI 
CREATIVE EVOLUTION 

It is stated in the first chapter of Genesis, "God created 
man in His own image, in the image of God created he him." 
How can you reconcile this statement with your evolution 
theory? To say that man, "made in the image of God," by 
God Himself, is a natural growth from "the fishes of the sea," 
and "the birds of the air," and "the beasts of the field," is 
incompatible with the Word of God, for "God created man 
in His own image," "He made him a little lower than the 
angels," and "we are His offspring." 

"Evolution," says John Fiske, who is perhaps 
America's best interpreter of evolution, "is 
God's way of doing things." Creation is 
growth and growth is creation. The natural is 
supernatural and the supernatural is natural; 
there is no difference between the two. Evo- 
lution is simply the history of a process. The 
scientific evolutionist makes no attempt to ex- 
plain the cause of phenomena. 

120 



CREATIVE EVOLUTION 121 

Jesus Christ foretold the doctrine of evolution 
in the significant parable, "So is the kingdom of 
God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; 
and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the 
seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not 
how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; 
first the blade, then the ear, after that the full 
corn in the ear. But when the fruit is brought 
forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, be- 
cause the harvest is come. " 

The kingdom of God is a growth. 

And it is a natural growth. The earth bringeth 
forth fruit of herself. God is not apart from 
nature, making it, as a carpenter is apart from a 
box; he is in nature developing it, as the spirit is 
in the body shaping it. Where growth is God is; 
where God is growth is. For the secret of growth 
is life; and the secret of life is God. He is "the 
fountain of life." Whoever finds him, says the 
Hebrew wise man, finds life. It is not less true 
that whoever finds life finds God. 

In the museum at Harvard University are some 
remarkably beautiful glass flowers. They are 



122 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

made in Germany, and are used to illustrate the 
structure of the flowers. The maker of these 
twers takes some glass, a lamp, a blow-pipe, 
colouring material, and constructs a flower. It u 
then packed in cotton and sent to Harvard 
University, a finished product. When God makes 
a flower, he tells a bird to drop a seed in the 
ground. The seed he endows with power to bring 
forth the root, the stem, the leaf, the bud. the blos- 
som. It is never a finished product; it is growing 
and living until it dies, and then it decays and 
drops back into the earth again. A boy builds a 
snow man. As soon as it is finished the wind blows 
upon it, the sun shines upon it. it trickles down 
in moisture, and presently disappears. When 
God builds a man. he gives to the mother, by a 
process entirely natural, a little babe, and the 
babe grows with feeding, with exercise, with 
counsel, guidance, and control, into boyhood, 
youth, young manhood, old age. He is a living, 
growing being. All God's work is done by proc- 
ess or growth. Evolution is, what Bergson has 
called it. "creative evolution. " 



CREATIVE EVOLUTION 123 

The kingdom of God in nature, in the individual, 
in society, is always as a seed cast into the ground. 
It always grows up in accordance with natural 
laws and under the influence of forces or a force 
stored in nature. That force is God himself 
working, not from without in, but from within 
outward. 

Whatever may have been the origin of the race, 
that the individual man grows as the plant does 
from a seed, and that he passes through the 
various phases of animal life before he reaches 
the human form, can no longer be questioned. 
Embryology has studied the process, and we can 
see in the museum the forms which the embry- 
onic man takes on in the process of his prenatal 
development. Man is a growth, not only from 
the cradle but before the cradle. 

As far back as history can carry us society has 
been a growth. First was the family, then the 
tribe formed out of the intermarriage of different 
families, then the nation formed by the con- 
bination of different tribes. So civilization has 
been a growth; man groping his way through 



14 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

successive experiments, endeavours, blunders, 
failures, successes, to this age of railways, steam- 
boats, telegraphs, telephones, motor cars, aero- 
planes. 

This truth of evolution is illustrated by the 
growth of the American people from thirteen 
Colonies to forty-eight States; from a narrow strip 
along the Atlantic Ocean to a Republic extending 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the 
Gulf to the Lakes; from three million to ninety 
million. The growth of the nation, as the growth 
of the individual man, as the growth of the plant, 
as the growth of material civilization, has been a 
growth from a seed, by a natural process and 
under a natural law. 

It is not more evident that personal, political, 
material, national creation is by a process of 
growth than it is that moral ideals are growths. 
A thousand years before Christ the law is issued 
bo Israel: "Thou slialt not kill; thou shalt not 
commit adultery; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt 
not. bear false witness against they neighbour. H 
This represents probably the highest ideal of 



CREATIVE EVOLUTION H5 

which the human conscience was capable at that 
time. It furnishes in concrete forms a protection 
to the four fundamental rights of man: his right 
to his person, his right to his family, his right to 
his property, and his right to his reputation. 
But this ideal does not satisfy Jesus Christ. 
He is not satisfied to say, "Thou shalt not kill"; 
he says, "Love your enemies, bless them that 
curse you, do good to them that hate you." 
He is not satisfied to say, "Thou shalt not com- 
mit adultery;" he says, "Whosoever shall put 
away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, 
causeth her to commit adultery; and whosoever 
shall marry her that is divorced committeth 
adultery." He is not satisfied to say, "Thou 
shalt not steal"; he says, "Whosoever would be 
great among you, let him be your minister; and 
whosoever shall be chief among you, let him be 
your servant. " He is not satisfied to say, "Thou 
shalt not bear false witness against thy neigh- 
bour"; he says, "I am the truth," and bids us be 
sincere and simple and full of truth, as he himself 
was. 



126 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

These moral ideals are still growing, not in their 
essence as principles of righteousness, but in their 
application. "Thou shalt not kill" means in our 
time, Thou shalt not drive children to the mine or 
the factory where their life is stunted and they die 
before their time. "Thou shalt not commit 
adultery" means, Thou shalt not make marriage 
a mere commercial partnership, dissolvable at the 
wish of either of the parties. "Thou shalt not 
steal" means, Thou shalt pay fair wages to thy 
workingman, and thou shalt render to thy em- 
ployer fair return for thy wage. "Thou shalt not 
bear false witness against thy neighbour" means 
Thou shalt, as teacher in a great political cam- 
paign, try to tell thy readers the truth, the whole 
truth, and nothing but the truth, about the 
parties and their candidates. 

Evolution has nothing to do with the causes of 
phenomena. It offers no explanation of causes. 
It is the history of a process. Evolution repeats 
in scientific form what Christ said in his parable: 
"The kingdom of God is growth," and the secret 
of that growth is life within, and the life is within 



CREATIVE EVOLUTION 127 

because God is within; he is within nature, within 
the individual man, within organized society. 

This growth may be stunted, it may be mis- 
directed, it may even be a growth downward, not 
upward, a growth toward death, not toward life. 
Nothing is stationary. We are not; we are 
always moving, from the past to the future. 
We speak of the present; there is no present. 
The present is simply an infinitesimal point of 
time which we cross in going from the past to the 
future. Hold your watch in your hand, count 
the seconds. Those ten seconds have already 
become past history. The world on which we 
live is itself rushing through space at an incredible 
rate of speed, and, as if this were not enough, is 
at the same time revolving on its axis at an 
incredible rate of speed. We are travelling on a 
railway train which knows no stations; passengers 
get off, new passengers get on, but the train never 
stops. The world, the nation, society, the plant, 
the individual man, are in perpetual motion. 

The body itself is like a river; new material is 
coming into it to make a new body, old material 



128 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

is passing away from it because it is serviceable 
no longer. In a life of seventy years the man has 
probably had at least seven bodies. 

What is true of the body is true of the mind. 
It is growing, better or worse, up or down, toward 
life or toward death. You who are reading these 
lines know either more or less than you did ten 
years ago. If you do not know more, you know 
less, for how much have you forgotten that you 
did know ten years ago? Unless new knowledge 
has come in to take the place of the old knowl- 
edge you are more ignorant than you were. 

What is true of the mind is true of the spirit. 
You are either more virtuous or more vicious than 
you were ten years ago. You cannot stand still. 
Mothers wish to keep their children in innocence. 
It is impossible to keep a child innocent. Inno- 
cence and ignorance go together; virtue and 
knowledge go together. The child who does not 
know the difference between truth and falsehood 
i^ innocent. He is not virtuous until he knows 
that he can gain some real or apparent, some 
temporary or permanent advantage by falsehood, 



CREATIVE EVOLUTION 129 

and chooses to follow the truth and take the con- 
sequences. Virtue is a result of struggle, and 
struggle means growth, and growth means life. 
Where there is no struggle there is no growth, 
where there is no growth there is no life, and where 
there is no life there is decay. 

The notion that evolution bows God out of the 
universe is a wholly erroneous notion. It brings 
God nearer to us. It makes every day a creative 
day. God is as truly in the grass, the herb, the 
tree, in the gardens of America this summer as 
he was in the day when he said, "Let the earth 
bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, the 
fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed 
is in itself, upon the earth. " He is as truly in all 
the operations of nature as he was when the 
Psalmist wrote, "He sendeth the springs into the 
valleys, which run among the hills. . . . He 
causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb 
for the service of man." He is as truly in the 
growth and glory of America as he was in the 
promise of the growth and glory of Israel when 
Isaiah wrote, "The Gentiles shall come to thy 



180 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising/' 
He is as truly the companion and friend of the 
individual soul as he was when the Hebrew T poet 
wrote, M I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and 
my fortress; my God; in him will I trust." 

There is a mechanical theory of the universe 
which affirms that every phenomenon is produced 
by a phenomenon preceding; that there is growth 
in the universe, but no life. And this mechanical 
theory of the universe is no doubt accepted by 
some evolutionists, but it is not evolution. 
"Evolution is God's way of doing things." This 
is my answer to my correspondent. God is 
creating man in his own image. We are God's 
offspring. He is creating man, as he creates 
everything else, by a process of vital growth, not 
by a process of mechanical manufacture. 



XVII 
WHY 

What reason have we for believing in a Being who directs 
all the life of the universe, from that which is manifested 
in a globule of water to that which is manifested in the 
orderly movements of uncounted . . . worlds. . . . 
Why did Mount Pelee erupt? Why tornadoes? Why tidal 
waves to destroy all that the animal and vegetable king- 
doms have laboured for years to create? Nature, with air, 
rain, frost, dew, sunshine, and I have co-laboured for ten 
years to raise peaches. I did my share; nature did hers; 
the trees thrived and grew apace, strong and luxuriant; in 
the pink blossom was the promise of a bounteous yield; a 
killing frost, and all was over. 

If you wish to acquaint yourself with the 
reasons which have led practically all students 
of nature to believe that there is an intelli- 
gent mind behind natural phenomena, you will 
find your purpose fairly well served in a recent 
book by a famous scientist, "The World of 
Life : A Manifestation of Creative Power, 

131 



132 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

Directive Mind, and Ultimate Purpose/' by 
Alfred Russel Wallace. If you have not access 
to this book, you will find a very brief sum- 
mary of it, with some illustrations of the argu- 
ments, in the Outlook of April 22, 1911, in an 
editorial entitled "The Great Architect. " If you 
wish to see the arguments for a directive mind 
and ultimate purpose in creation very concisely 
stated, you will find such a statement in the fol- 
lowing three possible ways of thinking of nature 
presented by James Martineau in his volume 
W Study of Religion": 

There are but three forms under which it is possible to think 
of the ultimate or immanent principle of the universe — 
Mind, Life, Matter: given the first, it is intellectually thought 
out; the second, it blindly grows; the third, it mechanically 
shuffles into equilibrium. 

To us, as to most students, the second and 
third of these ways of thinking are unthinkable. 
They need only to be stated to be instantly 
rejected. 

The scientist finds in the rocks manncfl of 
arrow-heads. From these masses of arrow-heads 



WHY 133 

he concludes that there were living in former times 
savage races possessed of intelligence, and using 
that intelligence to fulfil certain purposes which 
they had in mind. The philosophy which can see 
the evidence of intelligence in an Indian arrow- 
head, and can see no evidence of intelligence 
in the wing of a bird, is beyond my ability to 
comprehend. The wing of a bird, marvellously 
adapted by its mechanical structure to the pur- 
poses of flight, and marvellously adapted by 
its infinite gradations of colour for purposes of 
beauty, is one of the most perfect and one of 
the most exquisitely artistic of organizations. 

Doubtless there are phenomena in nature, such 
as the eruption of Mount Pelee, which it is difficult 
to reconcile with a benevolent purpose animating 
all creation. This difficulty led the Persians to 
believe that there were two directive minds in the 
universe, the one animated by benevolence, the 
other animated by malice. This notion of two 
divinities, a good one and a bad one, was borrowed 
from Persian theology, and has entered into and 
affected Christian theology. It there takes the 



134 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

form of a good God who is supreme, and a bad 
devil who is inferior. 

I was once asked to deliver a graduating address 
before one of the theological seminaries of this 
country. An orthodox minister wrote to the 
authorities of that seminary a letter of protest. 
''Lyman Abbott," he said, "is little better than 
an atheist, because he does not believe in a per- 
sonal devil." I neither believe nor disbelieve in a 
personal devil. History affords some illustrations 
of embodied spirits of men so malignant that they 
might not improperly be called devils; and I am 
not sure that there may not be in the spiritual 
world disembodied spirits that also may properly 
be called devils. 

But, if it is true that there are malevolent 
beings, other than evil men on the earth, who 
interfere with the benevolent purposes of the 
Creator, this does not indicate that there is no 
Creator or that he has no benevolent purposes. 

The scientist assumes that there is an intel- 
lectual order in the universe, and all his investi- 
gations and explorations are directed to find out 



WHY 135 

what that intellectual order is. The scientist does 
not create the laws of light, heat, or electricity, 
he discovers them. He assumes their existence 
and seeks to comprehend them. Similarly, the 
moralist assumes that there is a moral order in 
the universe. He does not create the laws of 
right and wrong; he seeks to ascertain what they 
are. 

This assumption that there is an intelligent 
order in the universe involves the assumption that 
an intelligent being has ordered the universe; 
this assumption that there is a moral order in the 
universe involves the assumption that there is a 
moral being who has ordered the universe. 
Belief in law involves belief in a lawgiver. 

I think it far easier to assume that with my 
finite mind I am not able to comprehend all the 
principles of an illimitable universe and an infinite 
Creator than to believe that there is no order in 
the illimitable universe and that it is a mere 
"happenstance." In other words I think, it 
more reasonable to assume that there are limits 
to my intellectual and moral wisdom than to 



186 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

assume that I know it all and the limitation 
is in the intellectual and moral wisdom of the 
Creator. 

I can, however, see that if there were no dangers 
to be met there could be no development of 
courage; if there were no burdens to be borne 
there could be no development of patience; if 
there were no difficulties to encounter there could 
be no development of intelligence. If the object 
of the Creator is the making of peaches, the 
illustration of your peach orchard would be a 
conclusive argument against belief in his in- 
telligence; but if the object of the Creator is 
the making of men, just such exigencies as oc- 
curred in your peach orchard may serve an 
exceedingly useful purpose in the creation of 
character. 

I make no attempt to solve the problem of evil. 
But when evils come to me I endeavour to meet 
them in a spirit, or, if you prefer, with a phi- 
losophy, for which I am indebted to Paul: M We 
glory in tribulations also; knowing that tribulation 
worketh patience; and patience experience; and 



WHY 137 

experience hope; and hope maketh not ashamed; 
because the love of God is shed abroad in our 
hearts. " 

In my life I have rarely, if ever, found any 
trouble come to me that I could not make use of, 
if I would meet it in this spirit. 



XVIII 
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 

Would you kindly give in your department of "Letters to 
Unknown Friends" your thought of how the story of the Book 
of Daniel should be taught to children? Is it right to let the 
boys and girls think of this story as literally true, or should 
endeavour be made to give them the lesson it teaches, explain- 
ing its true character? 

It is a great deal more important that the 
child should have faith in his mother than 
that he should have faith in the Bible. And 
it is certain that if her use of the Bible is 
characterized by any insincerity or suspicion 
of insincerity, she will by such use shake not 
only her child's faith in her but his faith in the 
book as well. If you believe that such stories 
as the Elisha stories, the Daniel stories, the 
Jonah story, are history, as history you should 
treat them in reading them to your children; 

138 



THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 139 

if you believe they are fiction, you should 
treat them as fiction; and if you do not know 
what to think, you should frankly acknowl- 
edge your uncertainty. Never under any cir- 
cumstances pretend to a faith which you do not 
possess. "Any kind of a person," says E. S. 
Martin, "will do for a parent — except a liar." 
Children are much keener than we think. They 
see quickly through shams and false pretensions. 
They discern the falsehood which is told them 
because the falsehood is thought to be profitable; 
and it is not profitable. 

This is my general answer to your question. 
A little more specific answer as to the best method 
of using the Bible in reading it to children may not 
be inappropriate. 

I think we have belittled the Bible by a false 
reverence. We have assumed that because it is 
inspired it cannot be human and because it is 
true it cannot contain fiction. We have assumed 
that God is limited in his employment of human 
faculties for the instruction and elevation of the 
race, to one or two faculties: that he can speak 



140 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

to us through the conscience in law, and through 
observation in history; but we have thought it 
irreverent to suppose that he can speak to us 
through the imagination and the fancy, and 
almost irreverent to think that he can speak to 
us through the emotions. I hold that the Bible is 
a collection of Hebrew literature; that it contains 
law, history, folklore, drama, fiction, poetry, polit- 
ical orations, religious orations, ethical culture 
addresses. I hold that it is a more divine book 
because it is a human book, and larger in its 
range of inspiration because it speaks through 
every faculty and to every faculty. It would be 
difficult to find any short stories in literature 
superior to the books of Ruth and Esther, or any 
epic poem characterized by profounder genius 
than the poem of Job, or any ethical culture 
writings more frank in their elucidation of human 
experience than the books of Proverbs and 
Ecclesiastes, or any folklore more naive than the 
Elisha stories and the Daniel stories, or any satir- 
ical fiction more keen and cutting than the book 
of Jonah. 






THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 141 

I did not always think so. When I held the 
narrower view of the Bible, I read and interpreted 
Ruth, Esther, Daniel, Jonah, as histories. Now, 
in my private reading and in my public ministry, 
I read them as fiction. It is not necessary 
always to say, This is history or This is fiction, 
but it is necessary always to answer with absolute 
frankness the question of the child who asks you 
for your opinion, and it is always necessary that 
that answer should not be tainted with the least 
suspicion of reserve, hesitation, or insincerity. 

I repeat: it is better that the child should lose 
faith in the Bible than that he should lose faith 
in his mother; and if he loses faith in his mother's 
reading of the Bible he will lose faith in the Bible 
as well. 



XIX 

THE MINISTER AND THE CREED 

Various ministers have written to me at 
different times, presenting in somewhat differ- 
ent forms a problem which I think perplexes 
many, especially of the younger men, in the 
ministry. The problem is substantially as 
follows: A young man has devoted himself 
to the ministry before beginning his theological 
studies. The result of his theological studies 
has been to change, perhaps materially, his 
point of view. He finds himself unable to 
accept certain of the tenets and certain of the 
definitions current in the traditional theology 
of his church. He still desires to preach the 
glad tidings, he still accepts and desires to 
proclaim to others Jesus Christ as a Divine 
Master and Saviour, and to use the Bible as a 

142 



THE MINISTER AND THE CREED 143 

guide book in life. But he regards the first 
chapter of Genesis as a psalm, not as a scientific 
treatise; the third chapter of Genesis as a parable, 
not as history. Some of the Bible stories he 
regards as folklore. For some of the so-called 
miracles he thinks he can find natural causes, and 
others he regards as unhistorical, and his spiritual 
faith does not rest upon the miracles and is not 
shaken by doubts concerning them. That the 
whole human race sinned in Adam and fell with 
him in the great transgression, he does not believe, 
and redemption has come to him to mean less a 
recovery from a fall than a divine process of 
development from a lower to a higher stage in 
creation. Entertaining these or similar opinions, 
he doubts whether his church will grant him 
ordination, or, if he has been ordained and is 
pastor of a church, he questions whether he ought 
to go on in the ministry, with theological views 
widely divergent from those traditionally held by 
his church and still held more or less tenaciously 
by many of his ministerial brethren. He is not 
willing to abandon his ministry, to which indeed 



144 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

he is more devoted than ever; neither is he 
willing to be insincere and pretend to beliefs 
which he does not entertain. I am persuaded 
that there are a great many young men who are 
kept from the ministry by some such condition 
as I have here described, and a great many others 
who are perplexed as to their duty in the ministry 
upon which they have already entered and in the 
course of which their doctrinal views have under- 
gone more or less radical changes. In what 
follows I will repeat what substantially I have 
said in probably some score or more of cases in 
private letter to inquirers. 

1. Sincerity is for all of us a fundamental 
virtue. It is in some sense peculiarly essential 
to the ministry. Virtue is virtue in every pro- 
fession, sin is sin in every profession; but there are 
M>me virtues more essential in some professions 
than they are in others. A coward cannot be a 
soldier, nor a dishonest man a merchant, nor a 
man lacking in the sense of justice a lawyer, nor a 
careless man a surgeon. So an insincere man can- 
not by any possibility have success in the ministry. 



THE MINISTER AND THE CREED 145 

He may, as a rhetorician and an actor, secure 
audiences; but the real power of the minister as 
a spiritual force depends on his personality, and 
his personality depends on his absolute truthful- 
ness. There ought to be in our speech no use of 
words in a double sense, no falsification, no 
evasions. This is, of course, universally true. 
But it is a truth which the ministry should hold 
peculiarly sacred. Professionalism; that is, the 
utterance of doctrines or the expression of 
emotions, not because they are real and vital to 
the speaker, but because he thinks they will be 
profitable to the congregation, is the bane of the 
ministry. No minister should ever give any 
justification or excuse for the question of the 
little girl, Is it true, or is it only preaching? 

2. I do not abate one jot or tittle from this 
fundamental principle in going on to say that 
there is danger lest we exaggerate our differences 
with our fellow Christians, or so express them as 
to give them undue proportion. The emphasis 
should always be laid on the spirit, not on the 
definition. Definitions in theology are always 



146 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

inadequate, for theology, to be worth anything, 
must be an experience, and experience is never 
capable of exact definition. Faith, hope, and 
love cannot be defined with the exactitude with 
which a mathematician defines a triangle or a 
parallelogram, or a chemist defines the constituent 
elements in water. When a congregation, re- 
peating the Apostles' Creed, says, %i I believe in 
the Resurrection of the body," if careful inquiry 
were to be made it would probably be found that 
many different things are meant by this phrase. 
It is certainly true that many different things 
have been meant by this phrase in the history of 
the Church. It may mean that the identical body 
laid in the grave will rise from the grave again. 
It may mean that the spirit will be clothed with 
a body which has some not well comprehended 
connection with the body laid in the grave, as the 
oak has connection with the acorn from which it 
springs. It may mean that every man has a 
spiritual body, subtle, undefinable, unrecognizable 
by >cience. which is released by death and rises 
into the spiritual world. It may simply mean be- 



THE MINISTER AND THE CREED 147 

lief in personal immortality, as distinguished from 
belief in absorption into the Infinite. All these 
opinions have been meant by the phrase in the 
history of the Church, and probably most if not 
all of them are more or less vaguely meant by 
different members of the congregation in their 
reciting of the Creed. In other words, our creeds 
are not intended to be theological definitions; 
they are intended, like the hymns we sing, to be 
expressions of a vital, spiritual experience. 

It is of great importance that we of the liberal 
faith should recognize the fact that all theological 
definitions are inadequate, because all spiritual 
experiences are undefinable, and that we should 
put our emphasis, not on our doubts or our differ- 
ences, but on our faiths and our agreements with 
our brethren. Nor is this merely a prudential 
maxim; it is a principle that should be carried out 
in all our life. I think, for example, that Protes- 
tants have greatly over-emphasized our differ- 
ences with our Roman Catholic brethren, and 
I think the very word Protestant is for this 
reason unfortunate. I am at one with my 



148 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

Roman Catholic brother in my faith in one God, 
a God of justice and of mercy, in my faith in the 
forgiveness of sins, in my faith in the revelation 
which he has made to us in the life and teachings 
of his son, Jesus Christ, and he is continually 
making to us in our spiritual experiences of 
fellowship with him; and these agreements with 
my Roman Catholic brother are far more impor- 
tant than my dissent from his interpretation of 
the Church and the Sacraments. I would not 
deny or conceal my dissent, but I would put 
emphasis on my agreement. 

How wisely to adjust these two principles, how 
to be absolutely sincere without overestimating 
the differences, how to emphasize agreements 
without a suspicion of insincerity, is a difficult 
problem. I think it can only be solved by the 
possession of a spirit which desires to find agree- 
ment rather than disagreement, but which also 
desires to find it through methods of sincerity, 
not through methods of concealment or false 
pretence. 

3. It is not the duty of a minister to depart 



THE MINISTER AND THE CREED 149 

from his denomination because he thinks himself 
to be more or less in disagreement with its tradi- 
tional doctrines. If he thinks that he can be of 
more spiritual efficiency; that he can do more for 
building up the Kingdom of Righteousness and 
Peace and Joy and Divine Companionship in a 
different church fellowship from that in which 
he has been brought up, he should certainly make 
the change. But mere theological disagreement 
with the church of his fathers constitutes no 
reason for his voluntarily leaving it. Jesus Christ 
differed radically in his conception and inter- 
pretation of the religious life from that prevalent 
in the general synagogue teaching of his time, 
but he continued preaching in the synagogue 
until he was turned out. Luther did not leave 
the Roman Catholic Church until the Roman 
Catholic Church refused to allow him to remain 
in its communion. John Wesley never withdrew 
from the Episcopal Church, though the Episcopal 
churches very generally refused to allow him to 
preach in their pulpits. 

These are safe examples for the modern 



150 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

minister to follow. It is both right and wise 
for him to leave his associates to decide whether 
the difference in opinion is so great that they 
desire to put an end to his ministerial fellow- 
ship with them. The church and the ministry 
are increasingly inclined to make the basis of 
such fellowship unity in the spirit rather than 
intellectual agreement, and those who find them- 
selves not in full intellectual agreement should 
aid to promote, rather than to check this tend- 
ency. For my part, I am glad to work in fellow- 
ship with any one who is working to promote 
the kingdom of God on the earth, whatever may 
be the intellectual differences between himself 
and myself, provided he is willing to work with 
me. But I am not willing to misinterpret or 
to conceal my opinions. There can be no real 
spiritual fellowship the foundations of which are 
not laid in absolute sincerity. 



XX 

FUTURE PUNISHMENT 

Do you believe in a personal devil and eternal punishment? 

Do you believe that it is possible to be "possessed by devils?" 

Do you accept the annihilation theory as regards the ulti- 
mate end of the irreconcilably wicked? 

How do you interpret the declaration of Jesus Christ in 
Matthew XXV, 46: "These shall go away into everlasting 
punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.' ' 

Answering these questions directly, I reply: 
I do not know whether there is a personal 
devil or not. But since there are malignant 
spirits in the body doing and seeking to do 
evil, I see no reason to doubt that there may 
be such malignant spirits disembodied; nor any 
reason to doubt that they may exert a certain 
influence over us in life, an influence, however, 
which we can and ought to resist. And I think 
it quite possible that some cases of so-called 
moral insanity are really due to the yielding 

151 



152 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

of the individual to the evil spirit or evil spirits, 
until by yielding the individual has lost the 
power of self-control. 

I have long since abandoned belief that any 
child of God, created in his image, will live forever 
in sin and suffering. I do not believe that any one 
has life independent of God, and I do not believe 
that God will keep any one alive eternally who is 
going on in sin and for whom there is no hope 
of redemption. 

In the passage in Matthew quoted above, the 
words "everlasting" and "eternal" are transla- 
tions of the same Greek word, and the Revi-i <1 
Version gives a truer translation of the text. 
The Revised Version reads "eternal" punish- 
ment and "eternal" life. Destruction would be, 
however, an everlasting punishment; that i-. 
it would be a punishment from which there would 
be and could be no deliverance. 

The Scriptures have much less to say about a 
future life than is perhaps generally supposed. 
The early books of the Old Testament make no 



FUTURE PUNISHMENT 153 

reference to life after death. There is no reason 
to suppose that the Hebrew people prior to the 
exile had any more definite conception of future 
life than was possessed by other peoples. The 
references to life beyond death, even in the later 
prophets, are few and generally enigmatical. 
It was Jesus Christ who brought life and im- 
mortality to light, and in the teachings of Jesus 
Christ and of the apostles' portrayals of the future 
life are comparatively infrequent, and they are 
generally vague. Only in the Book of Revelation 
is there any attempt to picture either a heaven of 
rewards or a hell of punishment. The only 
exception to this statement is furnished by the 
parable of the rich man and Lazarus, in the six- 
teenth chapter of Luke. 

No one would think of taking literally the 
pictures of heaven given in the Book of Rev- 
elation. No one supposes that heaven is really 
a walled city with golden pavements and pearly 
gates. It is difficult to see why the church 
should have taken more literally the pictures 
of hell contained in the Book of Revelation. 



154 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

When in that Book the author declares that 
he saw One like unto the Son of Man in the 
midst of the seven candlesticks, no one imagines 
that Jesus Christ dwells or dwelt in a candlestick. 
The language is symbolical and simply signifies 
that Jesus Christ dwells in his Church. There is 
just as little reason for taking literally the state- 
ment that the beast and the prophet both "were 
cast alive in a lake of fire burning with brimstone." 
Yet for some reason difficult to understand, 
preachers have taken some of the symbols in this 
book as symbols and others as literal descriptions. 
In my grandfather's house was a family Bible 
illustrated. One of the illustrations accompanied 
the counsel of Christ, "Why heedest thou the 
mote that is in thy brother's eye, but seest not 
the beam that is in thine own eye. " The picture 
represented two men talking with one another, 
with a beam of wood protruding two or three feet 
in length from the eye of one of them. Perhaps 
it was this preposterous picture that had the 
effect early to set my mind against the literal 
interpretation of the Oriental imagery in the Bible. 



FUTURE PUNISHMENT 155 

The references in the Bible to the future life 
are not for the purpose of giving us exact informa- 
tion respecting that life. Indeed it would be 
impossible to give such information. We can 
as little comprehend what the future life is to be 
as an unhatched bird in the egg could imagine 
what the life of the bird is to be on the wing, or 
the caterpillar creeping upon the ground could 
imagine what the life of the butterfly is to be in 
the air, or a little child in the nursery could 
comprehend what are to be the joys and the 
sorrows of manhood. The references of the Bible 
are for the purpose of giving warning and inspiring 
hope. They are addressed to the imagination, 
not to the intellect. Their object is not to give 
us instruction in the geography of another world, 
but to supply us with motive for conduct in this 
world. 

The vagueness, therefore, is not only unavoid- 
able, it is also desirable. It would be not to 
our advantage but to our disadvantage to have 
accurate knowledge respecting either heaven or 
hell. The wise father, when he gives a command 



156 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

to his child, does not add the threat, "If you 
disobey me I will whip you." He leaves the 
child to understand that disobedience will be 
followed by suffering and obedience by reward. 
But he does not define the suffering and he rarely 
defines the reward. In civil government it is 
necessary to define the suffering because other- 
wise the State would put too much power in the 
hands of the judge appointed to try the culprit. 
Punishments, therefore, in civil government must 
be defined, and to some extent this principle is 
applicable to schools as well. But this definition 
of punishment and reward is a distinct defect in 
government, due to the infirmity of mankind. 
The Heavenly Father gives no such definition. 
The text referred to in one of the questions given 
above illustrates this method of Scripture. 
Christ declares that the righteous shall go into 
eternal life and the wicked into eternal punish- 
ment; but he defines neither the one nor the other. 
It is true that on more than one occasion Jesus 
referred to hell as a punishment, but the meaning 
of the word hell in the New Testament is some- 



FUTURE PUNISHMENT 157 

thing very different from the meaning of the same 
word in mediaeval theology. Hell in our English 
New Testament is used to translate two Greek 
words, one Hades, the other Gehenna. Hades 
means simply the abode of the dead, and might 
not inappropriately be rendered by the simple 
word death. Gehenna was a valley outside of 
Jerusalem to which the refuse of the city was 
carried and where it was cast upon a fire kept 
always burning for the purpose of consuming this 
refuse. By the term "hell fire" Jesus meant, and 
would have been understood by his hearers to 
mean, the fire burning in this valley. It was a 
symbol, not of torture, but of destruction. When 
he says to the Pharisees who devoured widows' 
houses and for a pretence made long prayers, 
"How can ye escape the damnation of hell?" 
what he meant, and what he would have been 
understood by his hearers to mean, was, How can 
you, false pretenders, who pride yourselves on 
your religion, escape being cast out as the refuse 
of the universe, to be destroyed? Fire is used 
almost invariably in Scripture, except in the 



158 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

Book of Revelation, as a symbol either of puri- 
fication or of destruction; almost never as a 
symbol of torment. Any reader with a Concord- 
ance can easily verify this statement. 

Jesus Christ never endeavoured to frighten men 
into paths of righteousness, nor did he seek to 
win them to paths of righteousness by promises 
of reward. The notion that so much virtue 
should receive so much pay he distinctly and 
emphatically repudiated. 

He told his disciples on more than one occasion 
that if they were to follow him they must take 
up their cross, they must suffer, they must expect 
tribulations. On one occasion Peter asked him, 
"What shall we have for following thee?" Jesus 
replied with the parable of the householder hiring 
labourers for the vineyard. To those who had 
worked all day long P and to those who had 
worked only one hour in the day the householder 
gave the same wage, a penny or denarius. Good- 
ness of character is not a commercial article to 
be paid for by the square yard. A child's service 
to his Heavenly Father is not to be paid for at so 



FUTURE PUNISHMENT 159 

much an hour. Goodness is to be sought for its 
own sake, and service is to be rendered in the 
spirit of love for the joy of serving. 

The point of view which I am here attempting 
to give to my readers is abundantly confirmed by 
the history of the Christian Church. To attempt 
to convert men to the service of Christ by scaring 
them with threats of hell or enticing them with 
promises of the rewards of heaven, has never 
accomplished permanent results. The religion of 
the Middle Ages in Europe, the religion of 
early Puritanism in England, both of which were 
largely founded on the motives of fear of punish- 
ment and hope of reward, do not furnish the 
highest types of religious life and experience. 
In the reactions against the literalism of the past 
we may be in danger of going too far in the other 
direction; but on the whole it is safe to say that 
a present world religion is better for humanity 
than a future world religion, if we must choose 
between the two. The ideal is a present world 
religion inspired by the profound consciousness 
that this world and the other world, the present 



160 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

life and the future life, are all one, and that we 
shall carry, when we cross the threshold into the 
other world, the character which we have formed 
here and the memory of the deeds we have done 
here. 

To me there is no vision of the future more awe- 
inspiring than that suggested by the single utter- 
ance of Jesus in the parable of the rich man and 
Lazarus: "Son, remember." 



XXI 
DOES HIS MERCY ENDURE FOREVER ? 

In your article in the Outlook of August 17th, in which you 
give your "Confession of Faith," you make the statement 
that "The dogma that it is only in this life that man can re- 
pent, or mercy can be shown him if he does repent, I repudiate 
as unscriptural and inconsistent with faith in the Fatherhood 
of God and in the freedom of man." Will you please state 
what Scripture gives us ground for belief that there is any 
chance for repentance after death? If so, then why the great 
need of efforts to lead the unconverted to repentance and to 
God in this life? Also, why trouble about the heathen for 
their sakes or for ours, on account of the great commission, 
if after death we find our souls suffering on account of lack of 
duty neglected in this life, we can repent and be sorry and be 
removed to a place of joy? This would be reasonable along 
this line of belief, would it not? My dear son, who is think- 
ing of being a preacher, and is now in college, says, "Why, 
what is the need of me preaching or father staying all his life 
with the heathen if they have another chance?" His father 
is a foreign missioner; has been for nearly forty years. 

Your letter assumes that Jesus Christ came 
to keep us out of hell and get us into heaven. 

161 



Hto LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

But Jesus Christ did not come to keep us out of 
hell and get us into heaven. He came to keep 
hell out of us and put heaven into us. He came 
to save us — yes! but from what? Pain? No! 
He suffered the death of the cross, and told us we 
must take up our cross if we would be his. What 
then? From punishment? No! It is doubtful 
if he anywhere promises his disciples escape from 
punishment. He came to save them that will 
trust in him from their sins. One Evangelist tells 
us that he was called Jesus because he would 
save his people from their sins. Another Evan- 
gelist tells us that the blood of Jesus Christ 
cleanses us from all sin. John the Baptist hails 
Jesus as the Lamb of God that takes away the 
sin of the world. He himself in his last meeting 
with his disciples, pledging them in a cup after 
supper, says that this cup is the blood of the new 
covenant, shed for the remission of sins. It is 
sin, not punishment, which is remitted or sent 
away; it is from sin, not from punishment, that 
his blood relieves us; it is sin, not punishment, 
that the Lamb of God takes away from the world; 



DOES HIS MERCY ENDURE ? 163 

it is from sin, not punishment, that Jesus saves 
his people. 

That he saves from penalty in saving from sin 
is secondary and incidental. 

And this is the commission he gave to his 
disciples: Whosesoever sins ye remit, they 
are remitted; and whosesoever sins ye retain, 
they are retained. He does not promise that 
they shall deliver from punishment, but that they 
shall deliver from sin. 

Salvation is character. Understand me. I 
do not say salvation through character. No! 
Salvation is character. 

Two counterfeiters are sent to State's prison 
for ten years. One has political influence, and 
and after three months gets a pardon, goes out, 
and resumes his counterfeiting. The other serves 
out his full ten years, pays the full penalty of his 
crime, but becomes an honest man and comes out 
to live an honest life. The first man escapes 
punishment and is not saved. The second man 
suffers punishment and is saved. 

Salvation is character. 



104 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

The word Christianity does not occur in the 
New Testament. The word religion does not 
occur at all in the Gospels. Christ's word for his 
gift to us is "Life" or M Eternal Life." "I have 
come that they might have Life, and that they 
might have it more abundantly/' "I give unto 
them Eternal Life, and they shall never perish, 
neither shall any one pluck them out of my hand. n 
Similarly, Paul : M The gift of God is Eternal Life. " 

"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long- 
suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, 
temperance. " That Jesus Christ might inspire 
in men this life he was born, lived, suffered, died. 
This is what the preacher of the Glad Tidings has 
to offer to his congregation, and the missionary to 
the heathen as their inheritance. 

He says to them: You are perhaps agnostics. 
You believe that there must be some sort of 
intelligence behind nature, but you know not 
what it is. I have come to introduce your Father 
to you. You can, if you will, have him as your 
"Great Companion." Or perhaps you are afraid 
of God. You think he is angry with you because 






DOES HIS MERCY ENDURE ? 165 

you have sinned. You are mistaken. He pities 
you because you have sinned. And he wants to 
help you to sin no more. Or perhaps you think 
it is hard to find him. You are mistaken. Turn 
toward him and you will find him a Father who 
goes out to meet you, not with punishment, not 
with reproaches, but with the gladness of love. 
Or you have thought that you must offer a sacri- 
fice to appease his wrath or satisfy his law. Y^ou 
are mistaken. His is the sacrifice. It is the 
mother who suffers for her sinful child; the patriot 
who suffers for his careless country; the martyr 
who suffers for his age; God who suffers for his 
children. This is the Gospel. Not that God will 
let you off from punishment if you are sorry and 
promise not to do so any more, but that God will 
pour his life into you, here and now, and make you 
partaker of his nature, if you will let him do so. 
Do you remember Tennyson's prayer? 

"O for a man arise in me, 
That the man that I am may cease to be ! " 

The Gospel is God's answer to that prayer. 



166 LETTERS TO UNKNOWN FRIENDS 

I advise your son to write to the Missionary 
Boards of the five great Protestant denominations 
for reports of their medical and educational work. 
He will find that the "life of God in the soul of 
man," which constitutes the Christian religion, 
is social as well as individual, a life of human 
brotherhood as well as of loyalty to the Father. 
He will find that the Christian missions are 
carrying health and healing to the body, and 
inspiration to the mind. He will find that they 
are abolishing slavery, emancipating woman, 
lessening cruelty to children, elevating the home, 
promoting the spirit of peace and good-will. 
He will find that the Christian colleges in Turkey 
have revolutionized the educational system of 
Turkey, and that the Christian colleges in China 
have revolutionized the educational system in 
China. And he will find that, while doing this, 
and by doing this, they have established a religion 
of hope for one of dread, a religion of joy for one 
of torment, a religion of love for one of fear. Is 
there, then, no future life, no eternity? Yes! but 
future life begins here, and we are in eternity now. 



DOES HIS MERCY ENDURE ? 167 

He who will study with an open mind the 
history of Christian missions will find that the 
response of the emancipated souls in every land 
has been the response so beautifully interpreted 
by Phillips Brooks: 

"Where children pure and happy 

Pray to the blessed Child; 
Wheue misery cries out to Thee, 

Son of the Mother mild; 
Where Charity stands watching, 

And Faith holds wide the door — 
The dark night wakes, the glory breaks, 

And Christmas comes once more." 

To dispel the darkness of the night and bring 
in the glory of the dawn upon this earth is the 
mission of the Gospel. 

THE END 




THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS 
GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 



MAR 37 1913 



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